


tú eres el imán y yo soy el metal

by jenga, kalpurna, longnationalnightmare



Category: Pod Save America (RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Veela, Anal Sex, Barebacking, Blow Jobs, Bonding, Comeplay, Friends to Lovers, Frottage, Hand Jobs, Jealousy, Loss of Control, M/M, Pining, Possessive Behavior, Rimming, Romance, Semi-Public Sex, Sex Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-12-02 12:38:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11509605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenga/pseuds/jenga, https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalpurna/pseuds/kalpurna, https://archiveofourown.org/users/longnationalnightmare/pseuds/longnationalnightmare
Summary: The day before Jon's thirtieth birthday starts out inconsequentially and continues that way until the clock strikes midnight, at which point every person around him loses their damn minds.





	tú eres el imán y yo soy el metal

**Author's Note:**

> This is an AU in which Jon Lovett leaves DC a little bit earlier than he actually did, and also, some other things go differently. 
> 
> Thanks to the slack for helping originate this story, drunktuesdays for audiencing, and to giddygeek for a great beta, and especially for being the only one of us with the faintest ability to recall what it was like to be alive in 2011.

The day before Jon's thirtieth birthday starts out inconsequentially and continues that way until the clock strikes midnight, at which point every person around him loses their damn minds.

He's able to sleep in, for once, and he wakes up at the luxurious hour of eight in the morning and lies in bed just enjoying it. Then he makes coffee, checks the news, and goes for a long run. It’s already getting hot, even this early, and he has to tuck his shirt in the back of his shorts before he’s done with the first mile.

The sweat is pouring down his body when he gets home, and he has to wait for it to stop before he can get in the shower, or he’ll just be sweaty again five minutes after he gets out. He rinses his coffee mug and stands awkwardly in the kitchen, listening to the radio, trying not to touch anything.

While he’s waiting, the phone rings. He glances at the caller ID and picks it up.

"Hey, Lovett," he says.

"Happy almost birthday," Lovett replies. "You're going to be like a whole decade older than me now and I like it."

"I'm going to be one year older than you, just like I am now," Jon says. "Didn't you major in math?"

"One year and two months," Lovett says. "And anyway, you're going to be in your thirties while I'm still in my twenties, which sounds like a decade to me. Check and mate."

Jon laughs into the phone. "Fine, you win. I'll basically be your grandfather after tomorrow."

"Ugh, let's not go overboard," Lovett says. "My grandfather was a racist who smelled like licorice. So, are you doing anything for your birthday, or are you just gonna have the early bird special and call it a day?"

"Tommy and Cody are going to come over." Jon wanders into the living room and flicks on the TV, but leaves it on mute. "Ben Rhodes. Maybe some other people. Alyssa's traveling, and Dan said he's coming, which means he's going to cancel at the last minute and go to bed at nine."

"This is your future, old man. Get used to it," Lovett tells him.

"Mmm," he says. CNN is running some insane piece about birthers and he wants to turn the volume up.

"Okay, you're distracted which means you're probably watching TV, so I'll let you go. And I'm not calling you tomorrow, by the way. This is your official birthday call and you have to count it as such. I hate phones. It's 2011, why not just send a fucking text?" 

" _You_ called _me_ ," he starts to say, but lets it go. "Have fun in LA. Don't get involved with any creepy producers on the casting couch or anything." Lovett snorts.

"Yeah, thanks for the hot tip," he says. "Don't get too drunk now that you're thirty and your body is betraying you. I'm told the hangovers only get worse from here on out." He laughs with unnecessary cruelty and hangs up. Jon squints at his phone, mildly affronted; then he ferrets the remote out from between the couch cushions and moves on.

 

 

Jon spends half the afternoon napping, waking up to jack off lazily in the low evening light, slow and without intent, thinking hazily about nothing in particular, head turned to watch the sunset through his window. He feels tired—surprisingly tired—and weirdly hazy, his own hand almost foreign on his dick. Long week. He manages to drag himself out of bed and shower just in time to catch the doorbell when it rings, Tommy showing up early and first.

“Hey,” Tommy says, leaning in to clap his back, “welcome to the dirty thirties, dude.”

Jon grimaces. “Come on,” he says, “I already got it from Lovett earlier, lemme enjoy my last few hours of youth.”

“Oh yeah?” Tommy says. “How’s Bigmouth doing in LA?”

“Still loud,” Jon says. Tommy laughs.

"Wouldn't recognize him any other way," he says, coming in and kicking the door shut behind him. He's got two six packs hooked in each hand, which he puts down on the coffee table with a relieved grimace. He picks up the TV remote.

"No CNN," Jon says, hypocritically. Tommy rolls his eyes, but puts it back down.

"How's he liking it out there, anyway? He told me he loves it, but you're better at reading him."

"No, I think he really does," Favs says. He sits on the arm of the couch, cracking open a beer with the opener on the underside of a coaster. "He likes bullshitting people and being bullshitted without feeling like it's an awful statement on democracy." Tommy blinks.

"That makes way too much sense," he says, and leans over to clink bottles with Jon.

They're talking about the stupid six-part question from the Washington Post in the Thursday press briefing when Cody rings the doorbell.

"I got it," Jon says, jumping up. Ben Rhodes turns out to be right behind him, and they come in together, still arguing about something as they join Tommy in the living room.

"I just don't know if that's the right message when we don't know how Iran is going to react," Ben says. "The last thing we want is for Iran to step up the border conflict in Nimroz Province."

"Yeah, but—" Cody begins.

"We're going to have to re-learn what normal people even talk about on Saturday nights," Tommy says, laughing. "I assume there have got to be people who don't exclusively talk about work when they're not at work."

"If you say so," Cody says, shaking his head. "Hard to believe."

Their plan is to head out to the Georgetown bars around midnight, because, as they solemnly agree, they are still young and capable of staying out past nine. Jon is actually picking up his phone to check the time at the exact moment it changes over from 11:59 to 12:00, and he closes his eyes, stretching against the back of the couch without getting up. He’s had a few beers and he’s feeling blurry.

"Ugh, fuck. Okay, who's fresh and alert and not at all ready to go to bed?" he says, and then opens his eyes at the silence that greets him.

Tommy looks like he's trying to solve some kind of math problem. His almost invisible eyebrows are pulled together, brow furrowed. Ben sits up and licks his lips. Cody, closest to Jon on the couch, doesn't move at all, gone suddenly and eerily still. Jon looks at Tommy again, uncertain.

"Uh, guys?" he says, and laughs uncomfortably when there's no reply. "Hello? Earth to everyone?"

Tommy breathes in and shivers almost imperceptibly.

"We don't have to go out," Ben says. His voice is lower pitched than Jon has ever heard it. "These guys can go out. We can stay here."

Cody finally stirs from his frozen state, leaning forward to put his beer very carefully on the coffee table.

"Yeah, right," he says to Ben. "Nice try."

"What?" Jon says. He wonders if he’s drunker than he thought.

Cody turns to look at him, still moving too slowly, like he's underwater.

"I've known you the longest," Tommy says, his voice argumentative. Ben turns on him, lip curled. Jon is starting to feel extremely worried, and he can't put his finger on why.

"What is happening?" he asks, weakly. He shifts away from Cody, who is suddenly in his space.

Cody leans in closer, bracing a big, warm, hand on his thigh. Jon stares at him. He tilts his face to the side, so close to Jon's neck that Jon can feel the heat of his skin, and inhales. Then he groans.

"Okay! Fuck!" Jon says, scrambling backwards over the arm of the couch and getting to his feet, hands raised. All three of the others rise, too, gazes still locked on him like missiles on a target—but locked on different parts of him, he realizes in horror. His mouth. His hands. His—

"I don't know what the fuck kind of joke this is, but it's not fucking—" he starts, but the disturbing blankness of their faces tells him it's not a joke at all. Ben and Tommy are circling around to block off the door. Cody looks over at them, visibly sizing them up and dismissing them.

"Jesus Christ," Jon says, and grabs frantically for his keys, breaking for the window and the fire escape. He's almost too slow, Cody right on his heels.

"Wait, don't!" he hears behind him, but he doesn't pause to look back. He scales the railing, not bothering with the ladder, and jumps the fifteen feet to the ground to land in an awkward roll that briefly knocks the wind out of him. Then he's up, sprinting for his car and safety.

For a minute, he can't think where to go, mind still trying to grasp what just happened. Then he remembers with relief that he has Alyssa's keys, tasked while she's gone with watering her one plant and feeding her goldfish.

He locks the door of her quiet apartment behind him and sighs with relief, heart still racing. He doesn't know what the hell is going on, but there's nothing he can do about it until the morning, in any case. He looks at the clock above the microwave and realizes he's now been thirty for almost half an hour.

"Great start," he tells the fish.

 

 

Jon wakes up the next morning and almost wonders if he imagined it all. Everything about last night feels surreal. Maybe the guys had been drunk, or playing a joke. Maybe _he’d_ been more drunk than he realized, and totally overreacted. Jon scrubs a hand over his face and pushes off the couch, standing with a groan.

Thirty years old for less than nine hours and he’s already had one major freakout and given himself a bad back. Nice work, Favs.

He feeds the fish and leaves Alyssa’s apartment, deciding to stop for a coffee and donut before calling Tommy to apologize. His mind on the cruller he’s already picked out, Jon doesn’t notice the eyes on him as he walks out the lobby towards the parking lot.

“Oh my god,” a voice says. He turns to see a young woman staring at him, her purse dangling from limp fingertips. Jon sighs internally. He doesn’t usually hate being recognized, but he’s feeling off this morning, and very much not in the mood.

“Hi,” he says, a tense smile on his face, and he waves briefly before heading for his car. He hears footsteps speeding up behind him and looks back a split second before the woman is flinging herself into his arms, pushing him back into a white Honda. “What the _fuck_ , get off me!” he says angrily, pushing her back by her shoulders.

“You’re beautiful, oh my god,” she’s ranting, her hands clawing at the air in front of her. “Kiss me, please, you can do anything you want.”

“What? No!” Jon recoils, but then she looks up at him and his blood freezes. Her face is animated, but her eyes seem glazed and empty, just like—

“Oh, my god,” Jon whispers, shoving her back hard. She lands on her ass with a cry, but Jon is already turning on his heel and running for his car at full speed. He doesn’t understand what’s going on, but his self-preservation instinct has kicked into high gear.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jon spots a couple walking hand-in-hand. He watches in horror as they let go of each other and start moving towards him at a rapid pace.

Jon manages to get into his car and lock the doors. His heart is racing like a jackhammer, and he worries for a crazed second that he’s going to have to run over these people like zombies in a video game. Fortunately, Jon realizes with relief, they’re not coming any closer. Instead they stand and watch him for a few minutes—all with the same horrible blank expressions—before eventually walking away.

Jon sits in his car for a long time, gripping the steering wheel with shaking hands. Several more people pass by, but no one else seems to notice him. “What the fuck is _happening_?” Jon whispers to himself, before starting the ignition and driving off.  

He pulls up into the parking garage of his apartment building and takes the elevator (blessedly empty) to his floor.  He pauses, nervous, in front of his door.  Are they still in there? Jon wonders, listening for sounds from inside.  He hears nothing, so he cautiously walks in, peering anxiously around in case Tommy or Cody are sitting in the dark, waiting to pounce.

Nothing. His apartment is empty and dark, the trash and debris from last night cleared away and the dishes in the sink.  He could almost believe he imagined the whole thing.

 

 

Jon manages to avoid interacting with anyone for the rest of the weekend. He ignores calls from Tommy and the guys, and even lets Lovett and his parents go to voicemail. He gets stoned, eats crackers and macaroni and cheese from his cabinets, and plays video games until late Sunday night.

Finally, after the fifth insistent text from his mom, he calls her back.

“Hi, sweetie!” she says cheerfully. “There you are, I was beginning to worry about you. Did you have a good birthday?”

Jon almost lies. He could do it easily—a couple lines about having fun with the guys, sleeping in the rest of the weekend, feeling weird but good about being thirty. He could pass it off and end this call quickly, without having to put words to whatever the hell is happening to him right now. Jon’s almost scared to speak about it out loud, as if it’s not just some weird fever dream that’ll pass quickly.

But it’s not some fever dream, and sometimes, at the end of the day, a 30-year-old White House senior staffer needs his mom.

“I don’t know, something weird is happening,” Jon starts slowly. He breathes in and stares at his blank wall as he fumbles through an explanation of the last two days. “So, at first I thought the guys were just fu— playing a joke on me, but then these three total strangers reacted the same way, so, I don’t know.” He huffs a laugh. “I’m sorry, I’m not making any sense, am I.”

His mom is quiet for a long minute. “Oh, wow, I always assumed it was a family legend.”

Jon freezes, goosebumps popping up on his arms. “A family—what? This has happened before?”

Lillian hums thoughtfully. “My dad talked about it—I think it happened to his grandmother. Or his aunt? He didn’t see it first hand, he always talked about it like it was before he was born, so we just kind of assumed—“

“Wait, what is it?” Jon asks, sitting up straight. “Mom _, what_ happened to them?”

“I don’t know, that’s the thing,” Lillian says, her voice uncertain. “Dad didn’t speak much about it. He joked about it being the sex magic curse, dozens of suitors coming out of the woodworks.”  Her voice took on a thoughtful tone.  “Come to think of it, there was something about her thirtieth birthday party, so it sounds like you have that in common.”

“Mom, please— _sex magic, what the_ hell—sorry, Mom, I’m sorry,” Jon apologizes when his mom tuts over the line. “But please, just just tell me. How do I fix this?”

“I don’t—I don’t know. I’m sorry, sweetie. You might just have to—maybe it fades?” his mom says hopefully.

“ _Someone_ has to know, mom,” Jon says. He knows he sounds crazy, he _knows_ he does, but—how _else_ is he supposed to sound? “There has to be _someone_.”

“Maybe—” there’s a long silence. “Maybe your Great Aunt Edna? Do you remember—oh, honey, are you gonna be okay? I don’t like this—” 

“Just.” Jon takes a deep breath. “Can I just have her number?”

“You can have it,” his mom says, “but sweetheart—she’s out of the country. She won’t be back till—I’ll have to ask your Aunt Cathy the exact date—”

 “—Mom—”

“At least September,” she says.

Jon’s heart falls. Even though he keeps his mom on the line until the early hours of the morning, he doesn’t manage to extract any more useful information, and just barely manages to stop her from hopping the next plane and flying down to take care of him. Finally, he hangs up and falls onto his bed, exhausted and drained, with the thin hope that tomorrow will be better.

 

* * *

 

Jon thinks about calling in sick the next day, but the President had asked to meet with him first thing in the morning, and the only reason you flake on an appointment with the President is if you’re dead.

So he showers and dresses and hopes that he doesn’t look as bad as his reflection indicates (pale, drawn, terrified), and then drives to the White House. Showing his badge through his car window, he manages to make it through security and into the West Wing with only brief interactions with other people. He watches with dread as they look at him with a now-familiar look on their face, but manages to move fast enough to avoid any awkward encounters, before darting to the Oval Office.

The outer office is blessedly empty at this hour of the morning, but he hears footsteps drawing closer and familiar voices in the hall. Jon takes several deep, calming breaths, and hunches in on himself, trying to make himself appear as small as possible.

Obama strides through first, nodding at Jon before walking straight into the Oval. Jon watches in wonder at his retreating back, and Axe following close behind. They didn’t seem to be treating him any differently, Jon realizes. Maybe whatever is happening has already passed. Hope balloons in Jon’s chest. Maybe this was just for a few days, like food poisoning.

“Can I go in, Katie?” he asks, turning to the President’s secretary with a smile—a smile that fades when he sees her looking at him with a horrifyingly similar look. “Katie?”

“ _Jon_ ,” Katie breathes, stepping towards him. Jon reels back in horror and darts into the Oval Office without thinking.   _Shit_ , he thinks, looking at the two men standing by the Resolute Desk.  _Out of the frying pan, into the volcano._

“Favreau?” Axe asks, annoyed. “We weren’t ready for you yet.”

“Sorry,” Jon says, pressing his back to the wall and keeping as far from the desk and the man behind it as he can. “I’m so sorry, I—I misunderstood what Katie said.”

The President and Axe look at him strangely, but then Obama shrugs. “That’s all right, let’s talk this through now. You have the pages I wanted to talk to you about?” he asks Jon.

Jon looks at the folder in his hand and back at the President, a stone sitting heavy in his stomach. “Yes, sir,” he says, feeling cold sweat trickle down his back.

“Hand it over, let’s see,” Obama says, coming around from behind the desk. Jon shrinks back against the far wall. “Son, are you alright?”

“Fine, fine,” Jon stutters. He has no idea how to get out of this situation. He’s trapped, a hare in a net, as Obama walks closer towards him, his brow furrowed. “Sir, please—“

“Jon, what is it?” Obama asks, concerned, and quickens his pace to get to Jon’s side. Suddenly he’s right there, his hand on Jon’s shoulder, peering into his face. He’s close enough that Jon can see, with horrifying nuance, exactly when the change passes over the President’s face and the life dulls in his eyes, leaving only a dark, hungry gaze.

Jon has admitted to no one the dreams he’s had about the President, the shameful, secret fantasies about illicit affairs on Air Force One and secret after hours rendezvous in the Oval Office. He knows he’s a cliche, daydreaming dropping to his knees in front of his boss, but he can’t help it. Barack Obama is the man Jon wants to be and the man who’s given him everything good and worthwhile in his life. He’d never act on these fantasies, but he can’t blame himself for having them, not knowing the President like he does.

Except, this is not the President. This person wearing Obama’s face has none of the warmth behind his eyes or the humor in his bearing. He’s a scary, empty version of the man Jon knows so well, and he’s advancing on Jon with long, predatory strides as Jon skids behind the couch. “Sir,” Jon says frantically, looking around for Axe, for help.

An arm wraps around Jon’s torso and he’s tugged back against a large frame. “Jon, you beautiful boy,” Axe mumbles in his ear, his free hand coming up to rub Jon’s shoulder. “You’re everything we could have hoped for.”

“No, no no,” Jon whispers, and then Obama is right in front of him, bending down, and he’s trapped with nowhere to go.

“Mr. President!” a loud, booming shout breaks through the room. Three Secret Service agents burst into the Oval with their guns—not drawn, thank god, but unholstered. They’re all wearing medical masks over their faces.

“Sir,” the lead agent, Hank, says carefully, holding his hand out to the President. “Sir, please back away from Mr. Favreau.”

Jon watches, stunned, as Obama twists around and blocks him from the agents’ line of sight. “Don’t touch him,” the President demands, throwing his arms out. “He’s mine.”

“Oh, god,” Jon whispers. Axe tightens the arm around his chest.

“Sir, you’re impaired. We need you to come with us,” Hank says, taking cautious steps into the room.

“Hank, I swear, I didn’t do any— “ Jon starts to say, trying to peer around the President’s shoulder.

“Jon, shut up,” Hank says sternly. Obama _growls_ in response, taking a menacing step towards Hank.

They all stand frozen for a long, horrible moment, and then it all breaks. Jon jerks away and runs to the back of the room, pressing himself against the wall. Obama turns and starts to advance towards him, his eyes fixed on Jon, but two of the agents grab his arms and drag him towards the door. The third agent blocks Axe’s advance with no little effort.

“Jon!” Obama shouts, as the agents drag him out the door. “Favs, come with me, please!” Jon gapes in horror, the wall the only thing keeping him upright as he watches the leader of the free world being dragged, kicking and screaming, out of the Oval Office. Axe is shoved through another door by the third agent, making similar attempts to reach Jon.

A deathly silence falls over the Oval Office. Jon can see people peering through the several doors into the room, but he can’t bring himself to move. He slides down the wall until he’s sitting, and stays there for several long minutes, confused and scared and miserable.

 

 

After the Obama Incident, the writing’s pretty much on the wall. Jon doesn’t really need to be told that having a sexual super-magnet wandering around the White House, pheremonally influencing the fucking _President_ , is a no-go. He’s a smart guy; he can do the math. For a long, tense hour, Jon is terrified that he’s going to be thrown in prison or, his thoughts veering wildly, _shot_ or something.  Fortunately, the Secret Service seem to know something he doesn’t about what’s happening to him.  Hank, friendlier and more sympathetic as he talks to Jon through the glass partition, makes a vague allusion to having handled a similar case during his time in the military.  “A couple of the agents reported up to me after you arrived, and I was able to put the pieces together.”

“Do you know what this is?” Jon asks desperately.  “Do you know how to fix it?”

Hank frowns and shakes his head.  “Sorry, buddy, nothing I was ever told about.”

“Oh,” Jon stares at his lukewarm coffee in despair.

The Secret Service spend a couple hours figuring out exactly what the bounds of his influence seem to be (the effects seem to fade at around a twenty foot radius).  Then Axe swings by, looking deeply uncomfortable, voice raised to communicate from way across the room, to tell him that if he ever sorts this out—if he figures out how to tamp it down—of course he’s always welcome—but he needs to leave the White House until this gets solved.

It’s awful. He packs up his cardboard box gloomily while Cody and Tommy and Ben Rhodes watch supportively from twenty feet away. “I love you, man,” Cody says, “I hope this all gets worked out soon.” Jon suppresses a vindictive and unfair comment about how good Jon’s biology has turned out to be for Cody’s career.

The thing is: Jon’s been thinking about leaving anyway. He loves the job, but it’s 24/7, nonstop, it’s _been_ nonstop for years now, since the campaign. He loves the job but he’s _tired_ , and he’s felt flat, these last few months, something missing. So maybe he’d thought a little about what life would be like if he left: he could make his own schedule, choose his own projects, go into consulting, fuck around with that script he and Tommy started talking about when Lovett peaced out to LA.

But still: it feels terrible to be forced out like this, because his own body’s turned on him, for reasons completely beyond his control.

Jon sits quietly in the back of the car the White House kindly sends him home in, driven by a Secret Service guy with, Jesus Christ this is humiliating, his nose plugged up. When they get to his Georgetown apartment, he hurries up the stairs quick as he can, trying to ignore the stares he receives even on this two minute walk, heads turning, pupils dilating, one guy about-facing as if to follow him with a shocky, startled look on his face.

He locks his door.

He draws the deadbolt.

He kicks his shoes off, kicks his pants off too, strips down to nothing but his boxer briefs and curls up in bed.

He is going, he thinks, ignoring the steady buzz of his phone on the mattress beside him, to figure this out. He’s going to make the best of things. He’ll do some research and practice some–what–meditation or something. Jon knows how to tackle a tough problem. He’ll tackle this one same as the rest. He’s gonna get this thing under control.

 

* * *

 

Meditation doesn’t help.

“Of course meditation doesn’t _help_ ,” Lovett snaps, so sharply that Jon has to pull the phone back from his ear. “What’d you think, that you’d give your biology a stern talking to and it’d roll right over and shout uncle? It’s not like wringing a climate speech out of me, you can’t just manage it into submission.”

“When have you _ever_ been managed into submission,” Jon asks halfheartedly. He settles back against the couch cushions and closes his eyes. He’s so sick of his own apartment that he could puke.

“That’s a saucy question,” Lovett says, “and I’m not gonna answer it.” Then: “Jon.”

“Lovett,” Jon says.

“I know you’re used to just head-down-hard-working your way through shit, but. You need a new plan,” Lovett tells him, and stays silent on the line when Jon, resigned, fails to answer. Jon can hear him breathing. It’s comforting.

The good thing (well—) about the robustness of the White House grapevine is that even as an ex-staffer, it took Lovett about two seconds to catch the gossip about Jon’s...situation. He called Jon seven times in a row the night after he got “honorably discharged,” Lovett had called it, in a kind of fake-salacious, eyebrow-waggling tone, when Jon finally gave up on ignoring him.

“Shut up,” Jon said.

“Pheromones don’t work over the phone,” Lovett had said. “You can’t make me do shit.”

“It’s not _funny_ ,” Jon had snapped, and Lovett said, “ _Anything_ can be funny,” and Jon said, “ _Lovett_ ,” and Lovett said, unapologetic, “Laugh to keep from crying. So, what _does_ Axe look like when he’s out of his mind with lust?” and anyway, it _had_ felt nice to laugh, even he ended up crying a little, too.

Jon’s been talking to Lovett a lot since the Change. (“Seriously? Melodramatic much?”) Tommy and Cody and all his DC friends are sympathetic and eager to help, happy to keep him in the loop, but talking to them kind of sucks, knowing that they’re right here, within Metro distance, working the same jobs and going to the same Happy Hours and doing all the other normal stuff that Jon just can’t do anymore. At least Lovett, out in LA, is someone he’d only be talking to on the phone anyway, and also someone who has never, in thrall to Jon’s bananas brain chemistry, stared at his mouth with parted lips and breathed heavily in his direction.

And it’s true, too, that Lovett’s glib, boo-hoo-poor-you attitude is—well, it’s refreshing. Because when you get right down to brass tacks, Jon’s life these days is fucking bizarre.

His first week out of the White House, he’d really tried (hope springs) to stick to at least _some_ of his routines. He’d gone out running, grimly determined to enjoy the fresh air, and ended up getting practically tackled into the Potomac three separate times. “I wonder if we should hire you a security detail,” Tommy had said, worriedly, upon reportage. “But how would we stop _them_ from—”

“ _Ha!_ ” Lovett had yelped, conversely, when Jon told _him_ about the incidents.

“What’s _funny_ about that?” Jon snapped.

“Nothing,” Lovett said, “I’m just imagining what your stupid buzzed head would look like covered in river-gunk.”

Jon’s always thought that people who charged again and again at the same wall, acting surprised each time to end up on their asses, were idiots. Now, desperate to escape his situation, it turns out that he’s one of those idiots. Even after the running fiasco, he keeps—“Moron,” Lovett tells him, tone almost impressed—leaving his goddamn house, hoping that _something_ will go fine, will turn the whole situation around. He tries different times of day (maybe his pheromone levels fluctuate?); he tries sunglasses and a baseball cap (“Doubling down on that bargain basement Affleck vibe, huh?”); he tries thinking small, inconspicuous thoughts, _I’m not here, nothing to see here, nothing at all—_  

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Lovett tells him, after he’s staggered back from a trip to Target during which he was bona fide mobbed in the linens aisle by a coven of crazed moms. “What a stupid Disney movie idea. What the fuck did you go to Target for anyway?”

“I wanted a candle,” Jon says, and, listening to Lovett laugh and squawk for a long minute, finds himself smiling into thin air for the first time all day.

He knows he should probably stop and reassess. It’s just—if he doesn’t try to do _something_ , what’s left? Sitting around, waiting for nature to take some course he can’t predict? Everything ends the same way, though. He goes out to the movies and someone sits in his lap. He tries to drink sadly at a bar, which he knows from the start isn’t a good plan, and causes a bar fight that makes Politico.

All that’s left for him to do, eventually, is lie on the floor of his big, unbearable apartment and listen to the blues and count the ceiling tiles and wait for the CDC to come up with a cure. (“I’m sure they’re working on it, buddy,” Tommy tells him, pityingly.) 

“Jon.”

And talk to Lovett.

“What else am I supposed to do?” Jon says. “I’ve tried _everything_. I’ve tried every stupid thing. I’m out of ideas. I’m gonna be stuck in this apartment until I die, and nobody’ll even notice until my grocery deliveries start to pile up and rot outside my door.”

“It’s really not healthy for you to be cooped up like this,” Lovett says after a moment. “You’re starting to sound like me.” And he lets it drop.

It’s only a few days later that he calls Jon back and says, abruptly, “I ran into Michael Fassbender at a Starbucks today.”

“Cool,” Jon says. His heart isn’t in it.

“Not cool,” Lovett says.

“Fine—” 

“It’s _very_ uncool to act like you even _notice_ celebrities in LA,” he barrels on. “You pass Angelina Jolie’s table at a restaurant, you’re like, legally obligated to tell everyone she looked ‘just like us,’ not that you really gave it a single second’s consideration.”

“That’s great, Lovett,” Jon says. “Thanks for the anthropological info.”

“I mean—” Lovett sounds frustrated. “What I’m saying is—why are you still in DC?”

Jon can’t figure out what to say, for a second, the question coming out of left field. “What?”

“It’s like—the literal worst place you could _possibly_ be. It’s a town full of extremely driven, mind-over-matter people who’ve been ignoring their personal lives by sheer force of will since they hit puberty. They’re all sweaty and badly dressed and sexually frustrated. They’re on a hair trigger as is. Of _course_ you can’t go—I don’t know—buy milk without causing a street riot.”

“I don’t—”

“You were practically a walking traffic jam in that town _before_ your hormones went haywire,” Lovett insists. “You wandered into a bar, everyone went on red alert. Actually smart? Actually attractive? Has actual access? You’ve been District catnip since Obama got sworn in.”

“Okay, but—”

“There are places,” Lovett says, “and I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but it’s true—there are places where you _aren’t_ that hot.”

“Uh, David Axelrod tried to fuck me on the Resolute Desk,” Jon says, “so, like, I don’t think I’ve overstated the effect I’m having on people.”

“Who among us,” Lovett says dismissively, “ _hasn’t_ been almost fucked on the Resolute Desk.”

“...what,” Jon says, but Lovett’s already saying, “Don’t you think there are places you could go where there are so many other good-looking idiots walking amongst the jaded populace that you might actually fly under the radar? I know you think you’re a 13, dude, but I’m sorry, you’re like a 6 in LA, this city is packed with people sexier than you.”

“Who _are_ you?” Jon asks.

“I’m a sage advisor,” Lovett says, “and what I’m advising is: go west, young man. People aren’t gonna mob you out here. If they can resist Christian Bale, I think they can manage to resist you.”

“I can’t move to LA,” Jon says. His head is spinning a little with the idea. “I work at the—” which is of course when he remembers that he doesn’t; he doesn’t _do_ anything in DC these days.

“Listen,” Lovett says after a moment’s frozen silence, “it’s your life. I’m sure there are other places you could go to blend in; I’m told Vancouver’s the Hollywood of Canada. Or you could stay in your apartment, sure, and wait for 17 cats to magically appear, branding you a bona fide spinster. But if I were you—”

“Please,” Jon says, “enlighten me—”

“Come on,” Lovett says. “Things’ll be better in the sunshine state. I mean, they couldn’t be worse, right?”

He’s not wrong. He’s a wretch, but he isn’t wrong. Jon says he’ll think about it, and hangs up, and calls for a moving estimate right away.

 

 

Planning the move gives Jon something to do, which is a welcome change. He takes his time and does it right, because he can’t leave the house anyway, and also because he’s bored out of his gourd, and it’s nice to do anything detail-oriented; he orders a million packing materials online and wraps every dumb shot glass individually with bubble wrap. He could hire guys to handle this, he guesses, go sit in a storage closet playing Candy Crush for a couple hours and come back to find everything finished, and finished right, but he tells himself it’s cathartic, therapeutic, being the one to pack up his own life.

Lovett starts sending Jon pictures of the beach, of his neighborhood, of himself, once, flexing and making a face in a floor-to-ceiling window at the gym. “I know you’re gonna outshine me the second you arrive,” Lovett says, “but I’m trying to put up a fight.”

“You’ll be sorry when I start a riot,” Jon says glumly.

“You’ve become very self-pitying,” Lovett informs him. “I’m not gonna put up with that once you’re out here.”

Jon pokes around a little on Craigslist, looking at apartments, but eventually gives up. It’s hard to picture himself anywhere, and harder when he considers the possibility that, despite Lovett’s uncharacteristic west coast best coast optimism, he might still end up spending 95% of his time trapped in whatever space he chooses. “Can you just find me a place?” he asks Lovett, phone clenched between his ear and his shoulder as he folds shirts into a suitcase. “I can’t go around apartment hunting when I’m—like this.”

“Sure,” Lovett says with a level of cheerful agreeability that means, without doubt, he believes there to be something it for him. “What kind of thing are you looking for? House? Condo? Pool or no pool? Residential area or—”

“Just pick something,” Jon cuts in. “Anything. Maybe, uh. Maybe close to your place, if—just if there’s something good, I don’t know. It just. It would be good to have someone I could call if I—needed, I don’t know, whatever you pick is fine.”

Lovett laughs into the phone. “Yeah, and I have, like, years of resisting the charms of all you handsome Obama Bros under my belt, so you don’t even have to worry about me throwing myself at you.” Jon does not think it works like that. But God, he wishes it did.

“Mmm,” he says noncommittally. He folds another shirt. He thinks about Lovett squinting, purposefully unprovocative, into the gym mirror; then thinks about Lovett’s face doing what Tommy’s did, what Cody’s and Ben’s and Axe’s and, Jesus, Obama’s faces did, going blank and hungry in his presence, flattening with want. That was the scariest thing, maybe: the way they all stopped looking like themselves. When he imagines Lovett looking any less cranky, lively, lived-in, he feels faintly nauseous.

“Lovett,” he says, and when Lovett hmms distractedly, so that Jon’s pretty sure he’s already cruising for real estate, Jon says, “Promise you won’t go all feral on me,” feeling very small and dumb and desperate.

“Please,” Lovett says. Jon can picture him slouched against the back of his sofa, feet up on his coffee table, laptop on his knees. “I passed the guy who played the hot doctor on Grey’s Anatomy on the sidewalk last month, Favreau, and kept my hands one hundred percent inside the car. I’ll be fine. You’re getting a big head—”

“Hey—”

“—but don’t worry,” Lovett says breezily. “You’re nothing special to me.”

 

 

The movers come, and of course it’s a whole ordeal just standing back enough to get through the whole thing without someone begging to be fucked on a stack of cardboard boxes. Jon wears a hospital face mask, stays in the far corner of the room, and claims to have SARS. One of the movers—on the short side, thick arms—offers to go buy him cold medicine if he wants. When he smiles, his eyes crinkle, and Jon briefly considers just giving up and, well, giving it up.

If he squints really hard, peers deep into the Wayback Machine, Jon’s pretty sure he can remember sex—that is, what it’s like to have it instead of doing everything possible _not_ to. It’s a distant memory, though, and tainted by the fact that when he tries to imagine having sex in the _future_ , his mind draws an uncomfortable blank.

It’s almost the worst part of the whole thing, actually: the fact that, no matter what everybody thinks, Jon _isn’t_ getting laid, and can’t figure out how he ever will, ethically, again.

Everyone assumes he’s neck deep in it. Tommy keeps saying, “On the bright side…” like Jon had been starving before, like at least he’s in the land of milk and honey now. Lovett, during their almost daily phone calls, keeps alluding to the Sex Schedule Jon must have made to keep up with all the ass DC is throwing his way. “You sure I’m not keeping you?” he says sometimes, cutting himself off mid-rant, tone comically suggestive. “You don’t have _somewhere to be_?” Jon just sighs uncomfortably and changes the subject every time.

It’s just not worth getting into. If he said, “Actually—” and drew back the curtain, he’d just be inviting argument, which he’s not willing to entertain. He doesn’t want anyone telling him “it’s not like you’re not handsome” or “doesn’t _all_ sexual attraction come down to pheromones anyway?” He doesn’t want to hear someone say “I mean, if they want it—” and “what are you gonna do, man, go the rest of your _life—?_ ” and “don’t you think you’re hardlining this a little?”

He could open the door to debate, but it’s not a debate anyone’s gonna win.

Call him old-fashioned: he won’t fuck someone who’s not in their right mind.

If there were someone who didn’t act absolutely, unbearably unlike themselves the second they caught a whiff of him—someone who didn’t seem quite so drugged-up in his presence—

Well, if wishes were horses.

It really isn’t worth thinking about.

It’s hard not to, though, when this mover is cute in a familiar kind of way, casting eyes across the room at Jon as he lifts from the knees, t-shirt straining against his biceps when he swings a box onto his back and carries it out the front door of the apartment like it weighs nothing. Jon watches him as he heads down the hall and disappears into the stairwell. He imagines, for a moment, what would happen if he gave in; if he were standing at the door when this dude came back upstairs, if the guy jerked a little, and his eyes darkened, and he came close, stripped his shirt off, his jeans, walked Jon back until he hit a wall and pressed his body close and Jon had no choice but to grab him and flip him and look him in the face and—

That’s where the picture gets stuck. Jon might be celibate but he doesn’t have to be a saint; he can fantasize, can’t he? Doesn’t he deserve this, at least? But the second he tries to imagine actually fucking this guy, grabbing his arms—biting his throat—sucking his cock—something freezes. He’s keyed up but there’s nowhere to turn. He wants—

He doesn’t fucking know what he wants.

The mover comes back in wiping his forehead off with his t-shirt. His stomach is visibly damp with sweat, and Jon imagines, for a moment, that he can almost smell the guy, can almost taste the salt on his skin—

It doesn’t smell _right_. It doesn’t taste _good_.

The guy drops his shirt. He grins across at Jon, pushes his damp bangs off his face.

Jon smiles tensely behind his mask, nods, and retreats. He goes to take another long shower before they pack up the bathroom.

 

 

Actually leaving DC is depressingly anticlimactic. He can’t have a goodbye party, can’t meet up with anybody for fond reminiscences, can’t revisit any of his favorite spots or go the White House and sit at his old desk and tell the place thanks, tell it he wishes he could have stayed longer. Instead, to avoid traffic and because there’s no reason not to, he starts driving around midnight on a Tuesday and goes until he’s almost to Knoxville, stopping a couple of times at drive-throughs where, by the time he’s getting handed his food and the effect starts to hit, cashiers’ eyes glazing over, he can drive right off, no harm no foul.

He’d considered flying, initially, just habit, then had visions of being trapped with hundreds of other people in a chamber full of constantly recirculated air. No. God, no, Jon thinks, vividly imagining being escorted off the plane in cuffs by men in HAZMAT suits—if the plane even landed at all.  What if the _pilots_ were affected?  He’d be the hottest new terrorist to hit the cable news cycle.  No, planes were out.  Same deal with busses and trains.

Instead, the trip is a solid forty hours, excluding pit stops, of time spent alone with his own thoughts. He drives nights and stops to sleep by day to minimize his interactions with anyone he might accidentally roofie, and mostly car camps, wedging himself into the backseat and staring up at the ceiling.

When Jon was in college, this is the kind of thing he and his friends used to talk about—taking a couple months off, roadtripping across the country, stopping to see all the giant rubber-band balls and paper mache cows and junk castles and painted hills, man-made and otherwise, littering the American landscape. What had he thought it would be like? Drinking most nights, driving hungover through the Great Plains and the Badlands, sticking his head out the car window, probably, to shout at nothing. Fun. That’s what he’d thought. And even on the campaign trail, criss-crossing inefficiently from state to state, wedged into a bus seat working on the next speech and the next, and the next—that had been fun, too, a fun way to see the country.

This trip, though? It sucks. Jon feels lonely and pathetic and tired of his own company. He tries to listen to a couple of audiobooks, turns them all off because he can’t concentrate. The passenger seat of his car slowly fills with fast food wrappers. He doesn’t see any sights except the sights you can see from a window, and a couple of fields, nothing interesting about them, in which he stops and stands just to prove to himself that he still knows what it feels like to be outdoors.

It’s a relief, after suffering through a couple days of his own melancholy, and after a few unpleasant truck stop encounters, too—cars need gas, it turns out, there’s no way around that, Jon’s foot is still throbbing from the time he slammed the car door on it, desperate to escape a whole car-full of women scrambling over each other to try and keep him from leaving—to see the “Welcome to California” sign come into view, its yellow flowers beckoning him in, the no-nonsense announcement underneath: _Entering Pacific Time_. “Guess who,” he says, giving in to the urge and calling Lovett as he cruises across the state line.

“Caller ID,” Lovett says flatly. He sounds tired. It’s only 6 AM PST, Jon realizes, sun just barely cresting on the horizon behind him.

“Okay,” Jon says. For the first time in days, he feels cheerful, almost buoyant. He hasn’t been this happy since—well, since his twenties, he thinks wryly. “Guess _where_ , then?”

“What about ‘guess when?’” Lovett says, and yawns, but when Jon says, “Eureka!” there’s a startled moment of nothing before, more alert, Lovett says, “Hey, you’re here?”

“Five hours out,” Jon says, glancing at the GPS. “Give or take.”

“Gotta tell you,” Lovett says, “you jumped the gun a little.” But his voice is warm and familiar and fond, and Jon feels, one hand on the wheel, going 80 and not worrying, for a moment, about what’ll happen if a cop stops him, like the road is rolling him right up to Lovett’s doorstep. It’s a good goddamn feeling.

“Yeah, yeah,” Jon says. “Go back to bed. Lazy.”

“I will,” Lovett says. “Call me when you’re—I don’t know—an hour away.” And then: “You’re really coming.”

“I’m really coming,” Jon says. He hangs up, watches the sky lighten as the sun crawls higher. He tries to keep floating for as long as he can. Maybe it won’t last. Maybe nothing will ever get fixed. But this is a new phase of his life anyway, and hopefully he’ll find a couple things at least: a sunny apartment to confine himself to, a better class of taco to order in. A friend to help him figure things out, one way or another. He cranks the radio, puts his elbow on the window ledge, and drives.

 

* * *

 

 

Los Angeles is, theoretically, a step up from his life in DC.

It’s sunny and tree-lined and full of friendly, cute shops and cafes. There are weekly farmers markets and pop-up food trucks and free yoga in the park near Jon’s house every morning at 6am. It’s a city full of cheerful, attractive, aggressively healthy people with bright smiles and deep tans. Jon sees more women laughing while eating salad than he’s ever witnessed in his life.

Jon, however, sees all of this from inside his car or from a safe distance of fifty feet from the nearest living person. Los Angeles, for all its sunshine and sustainable living and ridiculously beautiful, happy people, seems to offer only moderately less isolation and loneliness than Jon suffered in DC.

He goes for early morning runs, avoiding the busy streets and sticking to wide, tree-lined residential avenues. Occasionally he’ll run by someone and see a familiar, stupefied look wash over their face, but he’s able to run fast enough to avoid any awkward interactions. He takes long drives through the hills and to the beach, but never gets out of his car for longer than a couple minutes. Once, just once, he chances an early morning trip into a Starbucks near Rodeo Drive, testing out Lovett’s theory that Angeleans are more adept at resisting the urge to jump attractive strangers.

He leaves with no shirt, several twenties sticking out of his belt, and three iced lattes.

“Dude, don’t laugh,” Jon says as Lovett cackles over the phone. “It was scary! And your idea sucked.”

“Yeah, my bad,” Lovett giggles. “Sorry, I really thought you’d have better luck out in California, but I guess I underestimated how strong your scent is.”

“It’s not—it’s not a _scent_ ,” Jon protests lamely. He’s not actually sure, honestly. Maybe people can smell him—he’s certainly never stuck around long enough to ask.

“Uh, yeah it is,” Lovett says. “I googled it. Pheromones are scent-based.”

“Great,” Jon mumbles, flicking absently through the channels.

“I mean, all indications is that it’s a good smell,” Lovett points out. “Clearly you smell delicious to—“

“Every person I meet and most animals?” Jon says bitterly.

“Animals? God, do they—“

“No! No, god, they don’t try to—they just, like, follow me. Like I’m fucking St. Patrick.”

Lovett scoffs. “Leave it to you to bring it back to Boston.”

“Ireland,” Jon points out, but a minute later he’s smiling as Lovett goes into a tear about the bastardization of Irish culture by the heathens of Boston. He stops his channel surfing on _Iron Man_ and drops the remote on the couch, settling into the cushions and letting Lovett’s voice wash over him.

Then Lovett overhears the sound of the television through the phone. “Is that _Iron Man_? Great, my cable is out. I’m coming over.”

“No!” Jon says loudly, sitting upright.

A horrible, heavy silence falls between them as Jon feels wracked with guilt and anxiety. He hates this so much. For months now he’s lived with this overwhelming loneliness, expanding like a black hole and consuming his happy moments and memories. These moments—where Lovett is laughing in his ear and the sun is setting just so that light fills his living room—are so rare and precious because they almost feel normal. They feel normal until the illusion shatters and he realizes he’s where he always is these days—alone, in an empty house, with nothing but a gaping maw of loneliness eating him from the inside out.

“Sorry,” he manages to get out, his throat closing up. “You know, it’s just—I don’t want you to—“

“Yeah, no,” Lovett interrupts him, his voice warm and understanding. “It’s okay, Favs, I get it. You can just describe the action to me.”

 

 

Lovett calls Jon as he’s getting back from his early morning run. “You look ridiculous, running around so early in the morning.”

“Are you watching me?” Jon says, looking back towards Lovett’s house. And sure enough, there he is—standing in his second story window with his phone pressed to his ear. Jon waves.

“I wouldn’t be if I didn’t have this stupid meeting with the execs this morning,” Lovett says. “I’m usually not even up for another two hours, because I set my own schedule and no one can make me get up before the sun anymore.” Jon sees him tip his head to the side, pointing at him through the window. “What’s your excuse?”

“Exercise is a great, healthy way to start the day,” Jon parrots in an announcer’s voice, just to watch Lovett roll his eyes and groan.

“You’re the worst,” Lovett says. “Ugh, I can’t believe I’m up this early. Flex for me.”

“What? No,” Jon laughs, but he can’t help the warm flush that washes over him. It’s nice, actually. He’s had no lack of sexual attention over the last few months, but he’s missed—flirting, he supposes. Not that Lovett’s flirting, really, he’s just being himself. But it’s still nice.

“Come on, give me the gun show, give me something to make up for being up before the mailman comes,” Lovett wheedles until Jon, laughing, lifts one arm and flexes his bicep. “Nice,” Lovett says. “Alright, gotta go get ready for this boring unnecessary meeting. I’ll call you later.”

“Oh—yeah, sure,” Jon says, suddenly adrift. He’s not sure what he expected—Lovett to stand in his window all day so Jon can watch him? It strikes him how much he wants that, suddenly—to see Lovett, to watch his facial movements and observe him as he moves around, takes up space. His human interaction has been limited to voices on the phone, occasional video chats. He misses tangibility, three-dimensionality, sharing space with warm, living human beings.

Lovett hangs up, waves and moves away from the window, disappearing from Jon’s sight. Jon stands and stares at Lovett’s still house for a long minute, feeling much lonelier than he did when he woke up this morning.

 

* * *

 

 

“Let’s go to the beach,” Lovett says as soon as Jon picks up the phone.

“What?” Jon asks dumbly.

“The beach?” Lovett explains patiently. “I’m sure you know it. Sand, sunshine, blue blue water, usually the chance of seeing pretty people without many clothes on?”

“I know—“ Jon interrupts him. “I know what a _beach_ is, Lovett.” He sighs, staring at his blank wall. “You know I can’t.”

“No, dude, we’ll take separate cars, we’ll find a secluded spot, I’ll stay far away from you the whole time. It’ll be great. I’ll shout at you from fifty feet away. We can get In-n-Out on the way and you can lie to me about how it’s not that good.”

Jon wants so badly to say yes. Maybe Lovett is right, maybe it could work. A secluded cove, maybe with a bit of a hike to get to—it’s a Tuesday morning, it’s not like there’s going to be a mad weekend crush. He can almost feel how good it would be to be outside during the day, to feel the sunshine on his face, to be (almost) in the presence of another person.

“Come on, Jon,” Lovett says, his voice taking on a more serious tone. “It’ll be good for you. You need this.”

“Okay,” Jon hears himself saying, before he even realizes he’s decided. Lovett whoops over the line, and Jon grins.

“Great!” Lovett says. “Grab your bathing suit, be ready to leave in fifteen minutes. I’ll be lead driver.”

“It’s not a military convoy—“ Jon says, but Lovett has already hung up.

 

 

The “secluded beach” Lovett had crowed about turns out to be a small, brown beach that’s more dirt and rocks than sand. Jon thinks it’s perfect. He can smell the salt breeze and hear the ocean waves and Lovett is there, right _there_ , just twenty paces away. They stake out spots on opposite sides and set down their gear—a beach chair and a well-stocked cooler each, which Lovett had dropped by Jon’s car before he’d walked out his front door.

“It’s got nothing but Miller Light and Fritos in it!” Lovett shouts from his side of the beach. Jon opens the cooler and laughs. Lovett had, in fact, packed him two six-packs of beer and a large bag of chips, but there were also cold cuts and water bottles and several tomatoes.

Jon stares at them in confusion. “Am I just supposed to eat the tomatoes like apples?” he asks loudly.

“I don’t know what you health nuts eat,” Lovett calls back to him, already digging into his family sized bag of Doritos. He’s lounging back in his chair, sunglasses blocking half his face and a baseball cap obscuring his expression, but Jon could watch him happily all day.

After a minute of smiling goofily in Lovett’s direction, Jon sits down, cracks open a beer, and leans back to let the sun beat down on him.

This, Jon supposes, is what people imagine life in southern California is all about. A lazy day at the beach, a cold beer in hand, and nothing to do for hours but turn brown under the hot sun.

“Put more sunscreen on!” Lovett calls out, and a bottle bounces off of Jon’s chest. “You’re burning.”

“I’m _tanning_ ,” Jon corrects. “Just because you burn in November doesn’t mean we all do,” he jokes, but he uncaps the sunscreen to rub some onto his arms and face. He looks up to see Lovett watching him, his face shadowed by the brim of his hat. “Do I have some on my face?”

“No, your face is perfect,” Lovett sighs. “Give me the bottle back, the Jew gets priority.”

Jon tosses the sunscreen back in Lovett’s direction and then digs through his cooler for another beer. He’s amazed at how well this worked out. Sure, he has to shout to be heard by Lovett, and they alternate turns in the water to avoid accidentally drifting too close to each other (and who knows what water does to Jon’s ‘scent’?) but it’s been exactly what he needed. He’s felt almost normal all day—just another guy enjoying a beach day with his boyf—best friend.

It’s all wonderful until it’s not.

He’s jerked out of a light nap by the sound of tires on gravel, and looks over to grassy edge of the beach to see a group of teenagers piling out of a car. He tenses, looking back to exchange nervous glances with Lovett.

Lovett considers the newcomers and shrugs and squiggles his hand in the air as if to say _might be okay_. He’s got a point—the teens are setting up their gear a good hundred feet away, unpacking blankets and umbrellas and several suspicious looking unlabelled bottles. They don’t appear to be making any moves towards their side of the beach, so Jon exhales and forces himself to calm down. He’s been having such a good day—he’d rather not ruin it by being overly paranoid.

It might have all been fine if not for the football that one of the boys overshoots. It lands on the sand between Jon and Lovett, who has just gotten up to go for a dip in the water.

“Over here!” the guy shouts over at them. Lovett looks at Jon and then the football, which sits significantly closer to Jon than Lovett has ventured all day.

“Dude, come on,” the other guy calls out impatiently. Jon holds his breath as Lovett jogs over to the football and tosses it towards the teenagers. They wave in thanks and turn back to their game.

Jon sits, frozen in his seat, and watches Lovett’s face in terror. _Don’t,_ he pleads. _Please, don’t, please don’t become like everyone else_.

Lovett looks up at Jon and stares at him for a long minute, before taking two giant, lurching steps backwards. Jon feels self-loathing twist inside him as he stumbles to his feet. He grabs the cooler and chair and moves swiftly towards his car. Lovett calls out to him, but Jon ignores him as he scrambles over rocks and sand, focused on getting distance from other people—from Lovett—as quickly as he can.

He’s three miles down the highway when Lovett calls his cell. “Hey, I’m catching up,” Lovett says, and Jon looks in his mirror to see Lovett’s car closing the distance between them.

“You okay?” Lovett asks.

“Me?” Jon says. “What about you?”

“Dude, I’m fine, you didn’t—I’m not affected at all. I feel totally normal.”

Jon exhales shakily. “You were looking at me kind of weird,” he explains.

“You were looking at _me_ weird,” Lovett retorts. Which, fair point.

“You moved back quickly, like you were—“ Jon cuts himself off. _Like he was afraid of Jon._

“I didn’t want you to get nervous,” Lovett explains quietly. “You looked freaked out.”

Jon squeezes the steering wheel tightly. “I was. I am, I guess. I don’t want you to be affected—you’re the last person I really feel like I have anymore, you know? The way it was before. I don’t want to take advantage of you.”

Lovett is quiet for a long minute before he speaks up. “Hey, I get that. I really do. But if it helps—if I ever do get too close, and something happens? I’m telling you now I’m okay with it.”

Jon squints into the bright sky. “You’re okay with it?”

“Sure,” Lovett says confidently. “I love sex. Sex is great. I especially love sex with hot guys who flex their muscles for me after they run.”

Jon lets out a surprised laugh. “That’s nice, dude, but that’s not the same—“

“I bet you’re good at it, too. Maybe especially with the sex powers. Have you figured out if you’re better in bed now?”

Jon falls silent for a long, obvious silence.

“Oh,” Lovett says. “Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought. Favs, buddy, you can’t do this to yourself. There are lots of people who want to have sex with you, sex potion genes or no. You don’t need to lock yourself up in a glass case of emotions or whatever this is. Go out, get laid, enjoy this weird shitty thing that’s happening to you!” 

“Look,” Jon says, frustrated. Why doesn’t Lovett _get this_ , he thinks angrily. “I can’t—I won’t do that to some poor, unsuspecting person who doesn’t know what they’re getting into. Even if they want to, how do I know that?" 

“I don’t know, use a dating app like the rest of us?” Lovett says. “Maybe the reason this is so bad right now is _because_ you’re celibate, have you thought of that? Like, maybe if you get laid, the power wears off a bit.”

Jon falls quiet, considering. Lovett might have a point, he really has no clue what he’s dealing with here. Maybe it would be easier if—

“No,” he says quietly. “No, I can’t take the risk of taking advantage of someone.”

“Okay, then, how about me?”

“You?”

“Jon Lovett, 28, proud gay idiot. Knows his way around the male anatomy and the heart and mind of Jon Favreau. Just a thought.”

Jon’s mouth twists. “Can you stop joking about this?”

“Who’s joking?” Lovett asks, and Jon hears something in his voice that makes him take notice. “Look,” he sighs. “If you’re going to make me say it, I’ve had a crush on you since our first year in the White House. This wouldn’t be an imposition or anything like that.”

Jon looks up and finds Lovett’s face in his rearview mirror. He’s serious. “You have a crush on me?” Jon finally says lamely.

Lovett snorts. “Yeah, newsflash: me and one out of every four people you’ve ever met.”

Jon falls into a thoughtful silence. His first instinct is a screaming _yes!_ rising up in his chest. He’s lonely and exhausted and not a little bit hard up, but more than that he’s thinking about Lovett’s laugh and his eyes and the way he makes Jon feel comfortable. Cared for. So many times over the last few months Jon has wanted nothing more than to have Lovett with him, in person, filling empty spaces with his noisy, big, warm presence.

Lovett isn’t drugged by Jon’s weird biology. He’s offering this of his own free will. He might be making it up out of pity—very likely, in fact—but a pity-fuck isn’t nonconsensual.

So Jon pauses for a long moment, staring at Lovett in his mirror, before he finally answers with, "I mean, if you really want—"

"Great, race you home!" Lovett interrupts cheerfully, and hangs up. He pulls alongside Jon, waves cheekily, and speeds ahead.

The miles disappear under their tires in a blur, and suddenly they’re taking their exit, winding down residential streets, and parking. Lovett shoots out of his car and waves at Jon frantically, mouthing something at him before darting into his own house.

Jon turns his ignition off and sits in his car, breathing oddly. This is a mistake. Is this a mistake? The inside of his car is turning into a toaster, so he climbs distractedly out of his car and walks to his front door. He needs to—he needs to shave, or at least shower, or something, but then Lovett’s door swings open and he’s out of time. Jon wonders if it’s not too late to back out, to tell Lovett that he doesn’t need to do this. But as he watches Lovett scurrying over from his house, tugging a fresh t-shirt over his head, it occurs to Jon that maybe, just maybe, Lovett wants this as much as he does.

When Lovett catches up to him at his front door, he actually reels and staggers back a step, and Jon laughs because he thinks it’s a bit. It’s not a bit. “Jesus Christ,” Lovett says faintly.

Jon’s smile fades, nervous. “I can shower,” he offers. “I’m pretty gross, I guess, from the heat and everything.”

Lovett visibly pulls himself together and draws in closer. Jon takes an instinctive step back. “God, no, don’t go—don’t go away, I can’t take that. You weren’t fucking kidding, were you? I’m amazed that there’s no one like, trying to pull down the walls of your house Three Little Pigs style. I can’t believe you weren’t exaggerating.”

“I think it’s worse because of the shower thing,” Jon offers, but he’s smiling. This is more coherent than anyone’s been within a five foot radius of him since his birthday.

Jon unlocks his door and invites Lovett in, but he withdraws quickly into the living room, keeping a buffer between them out of force of habit. He watches Lovett carefully, warily, waiting for the familiar blank expression to come over his face.

It doesn’t come. Lovett looks a little dazed but still lucid—his eyes are bright and alert and tracking Jon throughout the room hungrily.

Jon backs up into his mantle and stops, having nowhere to go. "Are you—are you sure?" he asks tentatively.

Lovett breathes in, his eyes bright and wondering, and nods. "You want to know what it's like?" he asks in a low, husky voice. Jon’s pulse ticks up. "You still look like you, but I feel like I can see so many more details. Like I can see every one of your grey hairs, and I want to count them all. I can see how your throat shifts with different words and noises you make. It's _fascinating_."

Jon swallows as Lovett takes another step towards him. "It's not even sexual, necessarily. I mean, it is..." Lovett shakes his head, one hand rubbing his own chest absently. Jon’s hands twitch by his sides, wanting to reach out and _grab_ and _touch_. “No, but—I just want to see everything and know everything about you. You're like this perfect, brilliant enigma. God, how do you smell so good?"

Without either of them realizing it, Lovett has reached Jon and curled his hands into his soft t-shirt, pressing his nose into the crook of Jon's neck. His runs his lips up Jon’s neck, pressing wet, open-mouthed kisses along Jon’s throat and collarbone.

Jon's lifts his shaking hands to wrap around Lovett's back. It's been so long since he's been close enough to another person to touch them, let alone hold them, and he feels dizzy with relief and warm, viscous sensations. Lovett feels so, so good in his arms, tucking himself closer into Jon. They're pressed together everywhere now. Jon can feel Lovett stiffening against him as he grinds on Jon's hip. Jon tightens his arms around Lovett, holding him against him and letting him rut, feeling _insane_ with how good it feels to just stand there, almost motionless, while Lovett moves against him with abandon.

Jon is lost in sensation, running his hands over Lovett’s broad back and pressing his lips to his sweaty temple. Lovett, Jon recognizes through a syrupy haze, is mumbling against his throat. He struggles to focus on anything— _this is so good, so right, everything he needs—_ but he bends closer. "I need you, I need you please, god, touch me," Lovett is moaning. He doesn’t even seem to be talking to Jon—it's almost like a subconscious mantra spilling from Lovett’s lips.

Jon, however, is more than happy to follow directions.

He grabs Lovett by his thighs and hoists him up in one motion, loving his delighted squeak as Lovett wraps his legs around Jon's waist. He shuffles sideways and drops back onto the couch, Lovett sprawling on top of him with his legs out on either side. "You good?" Jon asks, running one hand up to grip Lovett's hair and tug. Lovett's eyes roll back into his head and he exhales shakily. 

"Do that again," Lovett slurs, grinding down onto Jon's lap. 

"Do what?" Jon asks, watching Lovett's face.

"I don't know, I don't care. Everything. Do everything."

Jon feels like he's at a buffet, with a thousand and one choices before him, but he realizes there's only one thing he _needs_ to do right now, which is—

—he grabs Lovett by the neck and pulls him down and kisses the breath out of him.

Lovett is groaning and whimpering against Jon's mouth and they've barely done anything yet. Jon marvels at how this mostly chaste, clothed encounter is already the most erotic experience of his life. He feels like he's on fire, like he can feel every nerve in his body _and_ Lovett's lighting up. He wonders—"hey," he says, pulling away with a sharp inhale. Lovett tries to chase his mouth but Jon claps a hand over his mouth and pushes him away a few inches. Lovett goes silent and still, breathing heavily behind Jon's hand.

"I think it's going both ways," Jon breathes. "I feel—I feel the same way you described. Like I can feel every part of you, you know? Like I need to know everything and touch everything."

"Thmftkmk," Lovett responds, before biting the meat of Jon's hand. "So touch me," he says after Jon snatches his hand away with a laugh. "I mean, fuck, Favreau, if you don't get me undressed in the next five minutes I'm going to burst into flames."

“Yeah,” Jon says immediately, nodding. “Okay, god. Yeah.” He shoves Lovett back onto the couch before sliding off and kneeling between his legs. "Can I—" he begins to ask, his hands gripping Lovett’s knees.

"Yes, yes, _fucking yes_ ," Lovett says, hands grappling at his jeans. Jon bats Lovett's hands away and undoes his fly, pulling the panels open slowly. "You're a monster. You're a magical sex demon monster," Lovett moans as Jon bends down to nose at the obvious shape of Lovett's cock through his boxers.

"You still came over here all on your own," Jon reminds him, thrilling at the thought. Lovett came over here because he chose to, because he _wanted_ to. "Like Little Red Riding Hood walking willingly into the wolf's den. Running, actually. Right into my arms."

"Such a fucking cliche," Lovett rolls his eyes, but his voice goes breathy at the last syllable as Jon reaches in to pull out his cock. "God. This is the greatest day of my life."

"Mine, too," Jon replies without thinking.

Jon has never given a blowjob before, but he somehow knows that he'll do this right. _Must be some sex magic thing_ , he thinks blurrily, leaning down to swallow Lovett down in one swift move. Lovett chokes on a breath above him, his legs falling further apart.

He takes his time. He loves everything about this, he realizes—the feel and taste and smell of Lovett's cock, the precum salty in his mouth, Lovett making delightful whimpers and clenching his shoulders with white-knuckle fingers. He didn't realize how much he would enjoy this—being so _good_ at this, the confidence he feels, the power zipping through his veins. Jon knows, deep in his bones, that he's going to give Lovett the best sex of his life, he's going to make him remember this, he's going to _ruin him for all other partners in the future_...

Jon pulls off, pressing his head to Lovett's thigh. He's overwhelmed suddenly, by all he wants to do to Lovett, by how right and natural and good this feels. Lovett hands rest on his shoulders, warm and sure.

Jon lifts his head and looks up at Lovett. The moment their eyes meet it's as if electricity zips through his veins, and he can see from Lovett's face that he's feeling the same thing. "Wow," Jon whispers quietly, tracing Lovett's features with his eyes. "Yeah," Lovett responds. Jon pushes up on his knees to kiss him, nipping softly and carefully at his full lips. He parts Lovett’s lips with his tongue and licks into his mouth. He could spend hours, he realizes hazily, doing nothing but kissing Lovett.

Lovett, fingers fumbling at Jon’s shirt and trying to tug it over his head without breaking their kiss, seems to have other ideas.

They strip down quickly, helping each other rip off shoes and shirts and tugging down their underwear. Jon considers dragging him into the bedroom but as soon as they stand up he’s seizing Lovett back against him, biting down on his shoulder. They don’t make it any further than the carpet in the middle of his living room. He straddles Lovett, letting them both enjoy the sensations of their cocks sliding together. He collects their precum in his hand and strokes them together in one fist, gripping tightly as Lovett throws his head back and groans, his feet planted on the carpet and his hips arching into Jon’s fist.

"Do you have any—"

"In—my—over there," Lovett pants, his hand flopping uselessly in the direction of his jeans. Jon grabs them and pulls out a small tube of lube and six condoms.

He looks at the haul in his hands. "Six?" he asks.

"We can get more later," Lovett answers, his eyes bright and glazed, as he grabs the lube out of Jon's hands.

Jon pulls back and watches as Lovett prepares himself, his vision tunneling into the dark space where Lovett's fingers are working. "Here, let me," Jon says, pouring lube onto his own fingers and shoving Lovett's hands out of the way. He pushes one of Lovett's legs over his shoulder and works his fingers in—two slide in easily, and a third fits in with just a little more resistance.

“Come on, come on,” Lovett says frantically, pushing up with his hips. “I need you. _Jon—_ “ his voice goes high and thin as Jon crooks his fingers just right. Jon watches his face hungrily, taking in every detail. It’s as Lovett said—everything is in sharp relief, painted in brilliant colors. Jon can see the light reflect in every speck of gold in Lovett’s eyes, the sweat beading at his temples and making Jon’s mouth water. He bends down to lick the pool of moisture at the base of Lovett’s throat, and a thousand distinct flavors dance on his tongue.

“You taste delicious,” Jon murmurs, licking again and then biting Lovett’s adams apple. It jumps as he closes his teeth around it, his fingers scissoring inside Lovett.

Lovett moans and squeezes the back of Jon’s neck, his palm damp against Jon’s skin. They’re both pouring sweat, Jon realizes, but he doesn’t feel too hot. He’s perfect, refreshed in every pore of his skin and more alive than he ever remembers feeling. Lovett bucks his hips up and mutters a plea (“ _please, Jon, please_ ,”) and then Jon is rolling on a condom and pushing into Lovett's slick, hot hole, and then everything—

—everything whites out.

Time must have passed, because the next thing Jon knows he’s collapsed on Lovett’s frame, his entire weight resting on him, and he’s shaking furiously. "Holy _shit_ ," Lovett breathes. Jon presses his forehead to Lovett's shoulder and moans. Lovett has both arms wrapped around his back, and his breathing is shaky and uneven. "Jon, do you feel this too?"

"Yeah," Jon whispers, feeling weak and shocky. The room feels like it’s spinning, but Lovett’s arms are locking him in place. "Jesus, what is this?"

"I don't know, but—I need you to start moving," Lovett whispers, clenching. Jon realizes he’s fully seated inside Lovett, and he almost blacks out again from how turned on he is by the thought. “Jon, dude, you need to fuck me, I need it so _badly_ ,” Lovett is whimpering, almost crying, and that’s all the encouragement Jon needs to start moving again.

Looking back, Jon will sometimes remembers this first time in vivid technicolor, every detail frozen and blown up in time. The way Lovett presses his lips to Jon's temple, the smell of his hair behind his ear, the way Lovett lacks the strength to keep his legs wrapped around Jon's hips, letting them drop down to the floor, weak and loose. He remembers the sounds most of all—choked gasps and tearful begging and his name, his name pouring out of Lovett’s mouth like a prayer, over and over and over again.

But also, the whole thing feels awash in a hazy mist, like gold dust slipping through his fingers as he tries to make it hold a shape. Just a constant hum of _Lovett_ and the sense memories of his skin and his taste and the feel of him surrounding Jon. Sensations that burn themselves into Jon’s bones, but which he’ll never be able to describe.

Lovett is gasping, likely getting rug burns as Jon fucks him into the carpet. Neither of them care. He can tell Lovett is getting close, and a roar rises in Jon’s chest as he pins Lovett's wrists above his head with one hand and grips his cock with the other. He strokes Lovett to the edge and brings him back several times—or a dozen, or a hundred, who can know?—before driving into him, grasping his cock and twisting, and surging low to capture Lovett's shout in a hungry kiss as he comes.

In a daze, Jon manhandles Lovett onto his side and spoons up behind him, sliding back in smoothly. One arm is pillowed under Lovett's head and the other wrapped around his torso, keeping Lovett pressed up against Jon’s chest. He strokes possessively over Lovett’s chest and down his stomach and, every once in awhile, down to squeeze his spent, twitching, oversensitive cock, making Lovett whimper and twist away.

Everything is touch and instinct. Jon sets his teeth to Lovett’s shoulder, sucking a mark into his skin. One of Lovett’s hands comes up and tangles with Jon’s fingers above his head. He pulls Jon’s hand to his mouth, sucking the fingers into his mouth and licking his palm. Jon can feel moisture on Lovett’s face—tears or sweat or both, he’s not sure. Then Lovett pulls Jon’s hand down and _wraps it around his own throat_ and that’s it, that’s all he can take. Jon is coming, wrapped around Lovett, and everything is bright as a sunburst.

It doesn’t occur to either of them that they can move, let alone that they would want to. They lay together, Jon softening inside Lovett for what feels like hours, unwilling and perhaps unable to separate. He feels as light as air, as if he’s floating on clouds. It seems impossible that there’s a street of houses outside his door, a city full of people outside of this room. Nothing is real except the man in his arms, pressing kisses to Jon’s fingers and forearm and twisting around to reach his jaw and mouth. There’s only Lovett, only the two of them, in a sun-drenched world.

They don't speak for a long time. They just lay there, sweaty and spent and _flying_ , as the afternoon light blankets them. Jon listens to Lovett breathe, cataloguing every little noise he makes until he falls asleep.

 

 

The next morning, Lovett rushes out without breakfast, claiming an early meeting. Jon stands in the kitchen as he leaves, holding two mugs of coffee and feeling stupid. But before the front door can close, Lovett stumbles back inside and kisses him, pressing up close to his body, soft and urgent and warm. Then he's gone again, with one unreadable glance from under his lashes. Jon smiles foolishly at the door.

Jon takes his own first tentative steps outside once he's finished both mugs of coffee. He freezes for a moment on the doorstep when he hears voices, one hand on the knob in case he has to dart back in. But the two women jogging past only glance his way appreciatively, not breaking their stride. He laughs in disbelief.

All day long, walking around LA feels like floating. The famous sunshine spills over him in golden waves. It's an incredible release just to buy a candy bar without being attacked. He laughs out loud again and the cashier gives him an odd look. She doesn't look like she's even considering throwing herself over the counter to get at him. She looks like she wants him to leave, actually. It's wonderful.

He visits the Hollywood Walk of Fame and revels in the inattention of the people around him. He goes into Starbucks to get an iced latte, and proudly ignores Jennifer Lopez, ordering a caramel macchiato in sweatpants. He gets bumped into by sweaty, irritated tourists staring at Google Maps on their iPhones.

As the afternoon wanes, he drives to Venice Beach, just as crowded with weirdos as reported, and goes for a jog on the boardwalk. After a couple of blocks, he takes off his shirt. No one looks. No one cares at all.

 

 

Lovett’s car is in his driveway when Jon gets home that evening, and without even thinking about it Jon bounds up to his front door and rings the doorbell. Lovett answers so quickly Jon wonders if he’s been waiting for him. “Hey,” Lovett smiles up at him.

“Hi,” Jon says, and then thinks: _fuck it_ , and leans in to kiss him. Lovett hums happily and loops his arms around Jon’s neck, pulling himself up for better leverage. For several long, lazy minutes they make out against Lovett’s doorframe, until a car driving by blares its horn at them and they break apart with a laugh.

“Good to see you, too,” Lovett winks, kicking his door open. His mouth is shiny and pink and Jon can’t stop looking at it. “Coming in?”

“Do you want me to?” Jon asks, propping himself over Lovett with one arm on the doorframe.

“Don’t get needy, it doesn’t work for you,” Lovett says, grabbing his hand and pulling him through the door.

“Says the neediest guy in LA.”

“I said it doesn’t work for _you,_ ” Lovett points out, walking away from Jon towards the kitchen. “It works great for me. It’s, like, thirty percent of my persona.”

“Lowball,” Jon says, and then—because what’s stopping him?—grabs Lovett by the waist and pulls him him back against his chest. “Don’t you want to hear about my day? I went sightseeing. I bought sunglasses. I walked through highly trafficked parts of town.”

“Fascinating,” Lovett says, leaning back in Jon’s arms. “Tell me more.”

“I gave this tourist directions to Rodeo Drive and at no point did she try to have sex with me. Wrong directions, but still.” Jon gets his teeth around Lovett’s earlobe and tugs. “In fact, _no one_ tried to have sex with me today.”

“Are you hoping to keep that streak going, or—“ Lovett lets his voice trail off, tipping his head back and sideways to give Jon access to his neck. Jon dips down to press sloppy, haphazard kisses along Lovett’s jaw, licking a wet strip down his throat. Lovett breathes faster, his heart picking up under Jon’s palm.

“I don’t know,” Jon says thoughtfully. “If the right person gave it a go…”

“Oh, your—” Lovett’s breath catches as Jon pauses to suck a mark at the junction of his neck and shoulder. “—your tune has, uh—changed—” and Jon’s grappling him around, kissing him again, deep and insistent, walking him back into the room. Lovett’s body is perfect: solid and compact, and he kisses Jon back with an urgency, an eagerness, that makes Jon feel even more fired up, a perfect feedback loop, everything almost too good to be true.

“I had,” he gasps, pulling back for a moment as he and Lovett stagger back onto the couch, kissing Lovett again immediately, once, twice, “such,” again, “a fucking good day.”

“Cool,” Lovett says breathlessly, trying to scrabble at the zip of Jon’s jeans and push his shirt up at the same time.

“Very cool,” Jon says, and shoves a hand into Lovett’s sweatpants.

Lovett’s dick is fat and hard. Jon fists it once, experimentally, feels his own heart rate pick up when Lovett groans, then starts to stroke in earnest, watching Lovett’s face, noting what happens when he tightens his grip, loosens it, flicks his thumb across the head. Lovett’s cheeks are flushed. Jon stops jacking him long enough to yank his sweatpants off, ignoring his whine of protest, long enough to press his chest right up against Lovett’s and kiss him deeply, again, hand going back to his cock.

“This is the first time in history,” Lovett says, panting into Jon’s mouth, “that anyone’s _ever_ gotten off on being—”

“Normal,” Jon says dreamily.

“I was gonna say ugly, but—”

Jon reaches around with his other hand and squeezes Lovett’s ass as hard as he can in happy protest, his own cock jerking in his jeans at the sound Lovett makes. “Gonna make you come for me,” he says, and struggles back until he’s straddling Lovett’s thighs.

Lovett’s cock is painfully hard, red, leaking at the tip. Jon can see a hickey darkening on his neck. Jon _put that_ there. He wonders if he’d squeezed hard enough to leave a bruise on Lovett’s ass, too. Lovett’s skin is pale, but it doesn’t mark up easy—Jon’s noticing that already. That’s fine; he loves a challenge. One day soon—maybe tonight, why the fuck not, why the fuck _not_ tonight—Jon’s gonna turn Lovett over his lap and spank him till his ass is pink and hot, until he’s sobbing, and then—

“God, _Jon_ ,” Lovett groans.

“I’ve got you,” Jon says. He runs a hand up Lovett’s flushed chest, then starts stroking him again. “Gonna take good care of you, just like you took care of me—” Lovett bucks up into his grip. “I wanna see you come all over yourself,” he says, ignoring the way Lovett’s panting _not yet, Jon, not—_ “Can you do that for me?” he asks. “Can you come on your chest?” and bends forward, bites Lovett’s nipple so that he shouts and _does_ , cock pulsing in Jon’s hand, spurting all over his stomach.

“So good,” Jon says. He strokes him through it, sucking a little where he’d just bitten, ignoring the way Lovett whimpers and tries to squirm away, eventually releasing him and smearing the come across his skin. “ _Such_ a good day,” he says again, settling back and gazing hungrily down at Lovett. He’s a mess, panting and red, covered in his own come—Jon wants to fuck him for an hour, two hours, he wants to fuck him all evening, all night—

“Gimme a minute,” Lovett says, voice faint, looking bulldozed. He shudders involuntarily as Jon runs a finger back across his dick. “I’ll make it gooder. More good. Fuck it,” he says grimly, and wrestles back up, shoves Jon over the edge of the couch and onto the floor, rolls on top of him and gets to work.

Lovett's not very coordinated right now, which is somehow turning Jon on more than any amount of finesse. He clambers down Jon's body and collapses onto his legs with his whole weight. Then he rests his cheek on Jon's inner thigh, unzips his pants, grabs his cock with one hand, and sucks it into his mouth.

He can't get it down very far at this angle, but his neck muscles don't seem to be cooperating with him, so he just—does his best. He mouths at the head, licking whatever he can reach.

Jon watches from his elbows as Lovett tries to change angles to get Jon's cock deeper, his throat working convulsively, drooling around it. He coughs and pulls off.

"Please be aware this is not my best work," he says, looking mulish. "This is not typical performance. You messed me up." His voice is hoarse. Jon throws his head back and groans in frustration.

"Lovett!" he barks.

"I'm just saying," Lovett mutters, and finally raises his head enough to swallow Jon to the root. Jon clutches Lovett's hair in both hands and comes.

 

* * *

 

 

Fucking Lovett on the regular is transformative. It changes—Jon feels melodramatic thinking it, but—literally everything. It’s like he’s spent the last two months in a miserable fog, but suddenly the air is clear—birds singing, bees buzzing, breeze blowing in his face, cool and refreshing, as he goes on his early morning runs, nodding at passersby instead of ducking off the sidewalk to avoid them, jogging back into Lovett’s house, sweaty and cheerful, to blanket him in the bed, ignoring the way Lovett groans and says, “You smell,” and, “You’re making the sheets all moist.”

“Yuck,” Jon says happily, and bends to kiss Lovett’s back dimples, the irresistible swell of his ass.

He isn’t sure what about this is making his pheromones lay off—“See,” Lovett says early on, “you just needed to get laid!”—but he’s so happy he almost doesn’t care. He can go outside. He can talk to people. He calls Tommy to tell him how much better things are going. “That’s amazing,” Tommy says. “How did you fix it? Are you gonna come back to DC?” which—

“It’s complicated,” Jon says, watching Lovett stoop over his laptop at the dining room table, typing furiously and scowling. “I’ll probably—I think I’m gonna stay out here for a while.”

He and Lovett had spent a lot of time together before—well, as together as they could, given the constraints of Jon’s situation. Now, they’re basically inseparable. Jon picks up a couple of consulting jobs, now that he can leave the house without fear of being rent limb from limb, and starts going with Lovett to the coffee shop he likes to write at, working together for hours, staring out the window at the bright sun, clear sky, watching people as they wander past. Everything feels so much better it’s unbelievable. Food tastes richer, music sounds more intense, he runs faster, reads more; he feels, for the first time in months, like a person. Not just like a person—like the best person he’s ever been. It feels easy, endless. It feels so effortless it defies belief.

 

 

Jon and Lovett fuck so regularly that they don’t have any idea of the length of the half-life on this “sex cure,” Lovett calls it smugly, rolling onto his stomach and propping his chin on his hand.

“Sex bandaid,” Jon suggests, tracing patterns over Lovett’s back.

“Cured by the mystical power of my ass,” Lovett asserts, pillowing his head on his arms and sighing happily.

It doesn’t really occur to either of them to stop having sex long enough to test out how long it would take before people started chasing Jon down the street again.  It’s not until Lovett has to go back to New York for a weekend that they’re confronted with the uneasy question—how long will it take to wear off?

Jon forces himself to leave his house all three days Lovett is gone, feeling each time like he’s bungee jumping and hoping the rope will hold.  He goes grocery shopping, makes two runs to the hardware store after his sink clogs, and has a long, strained, solo dinner Saturday night at an outdoor bistro.  He tenses every time the waiter comes by or another patron walks too close to his table, but he finishes his dinner and pays his bill without experiencing any strange interactions.  No one seems to be looking at him oddly, or even paying him that much attention.

On Sunday, Jon wanders through the farmer’s market and practices breathing normally.  He buys a set of homemade jams and a bunch of kale, and then he goes home and tries not to watch the clock too eagerly.  Jon gets to the airport forty minutes before Lovett’s flight arrives, so he parks and heads to the arrivals level to wait.  He feels antsy all over, waiting for someone to look at him strangely, waiting for someone to approach him with that familiar look on their faces.  He imagines, horribly, every face in the airport turning slowly in his direction and a mob descending on him, tearing his clothes off and clawing at his—

“Hey!” Jon looks up, awash in relief and delight, to see Lovett practically jogging towards him.  “You didn’t need to come meet me in—“ Lovett’s words are swallowed up as Jon seizes him to him and seals his lips with his own.  “Aw, did you miss me?” Lovett says, pecking Jon one more time before pulling back and smiling at him.

“Like crazy." Jon grins, but he means it. He must have been pushing right up against the breaking point of the sex cure, because he feels much too desperate for him, like their first time; wants to push his hands inside his clothes right there in the airport. Apparently a weekend is about his limit. He can’t imagine going any longer.

“Come on,” Lovett says, grabbing his forearm and steering him to the exit. “I’ll suck your cock on the drive home—we’ve got to recharge that battery.”

“Uh, yeah,” Jon says, following him eagerly.  “That sounds like a great plan.”

 

* * *

  

It takes a while for Jon to talk Lovett into taking him out to the WeHo bars. Lovett gives him a skeptical look.

"It's not Georgetown, you realize. You're not going to get to wear a button-down."

"Come on, it'll be fun," Jon says. He has a vague image in his mind of dancing under a disco ball, Lovett in his arms, which he isn't going to articulate out loud because he has a feeling it's both sappy and outdated.

"Ugh. Well, we're not doing bottle service," Lovett says, but he has his phone out, calling them a cab.

The bar is loud and crowded, but fun.

"What about that guy?" Lovett says into his ear.

Even weeks in, it feels daring and forbidden to actually be out in public, in a crowd, like Jon's getting away with something he shouldn't. He sucks happily on the straw of his vodka soda.

"With lime," he had shouted at Lovett over the thumping bass, and Lovett had rolled his eyes.

"You have the taste of a sorority girl," he’d yelled back, but there are two limes in the drink. Jon grins to himself and leans against a column, content, watching all the people not watching him. He tugs Lovett a little closer so that he's flush against his side. Lovett sighs.

"You aren't even listening," he says loudly. "That guy's into you! Blond, by the bar!" A trickle of concern invades Jon's mind, and he looks around warily.

"Like, sex magic into me?"

"No, like into you, into you." Jon relaxes.

"Mmm," he says, losing interest again, and tucks his nose into Lovett's curls. He loves the way Lovett smells. He wonders if he always smelled like this, and if so, how on Earth Jon missed it during those years of working together. He doesn't know how he missed any of it: Lovett's compact little body, his laugh, his thighs. He must have been blind.

"You're the worst, you're ignoring me again," Lovett says, but Jon can hear the smile in his voice even over the bar's sound system as he pushes away. "I'm going to the bathroom. Try to come back from outer space while I'm gone."

Jon watches him go, shouldering his way through the crowd with his hands raised to ward off dancers. That's another thing, he notes: Lovett's shoulders. They're surprisingly broad. And he has great arms.

A woman in a low-cut dress glances at him and then past him to the bar, and he smiles and waves out of sheer gratitude. She gives him a weird look and pulls her purse closer to her, looking away again.

He finishes his drink, and wonders what's taking Lovett so long in the bathroom. Usually, one of the nice things about dating—about being out with a man instead of a woman is that the lines for the bathroom are short, and he doesn't have to wait around alone and try not to look pathetic.

When he finally tracks him down, he's over by the bar talking to someone Favs doesn't recognize. He's muscular in that very showy, West Hollywood way Favs has never cared for, and he's leaning over Lovett, one hand on the bar. As Jon comes up behind him, he puts the other hand on the bar too, on the other side of Lovett, caging him in. Something in Jon's stomach turns over unpleasantly, like an engine starting.

"Lovett?" Jon says sharply. "What's going on?"

"Jon!" Lovett says, peering around the stranger's shoulder. He sounds relieved, or maybe caught out. Jon can't tell which. The music is really much too loud in here.

The stranger turns his head to look at Jon, but doesn't otherwise change his position.

"Hey, man," he says. "We're talking here."

Jon can feel some kind of noise trying to rumble out of his chest, a snarl or a scream, and fights it back down. He can't figure out a quick way to extract Lovett, and Lovett isn't showing any signs of trying to extract himself. He glances between the two of them.

"Jon, this is Josh," Lovett says. "We go to the gym together, I don't think you've—"

Jon feels his fingers curling involuntarily. He vaguely remembers a Josh from Lovett's gym stories—gym complaints, really—and if he recalls correctly, Josh was the guy Lovett had hooked up with "once or twice" that winter while Jon was still in DC. There were some vivid details that Jon can't think about right now if he's going to stay calm.

Lovett's eyes widen at whatever must be happening on Jon's face.

"Okay!" he says brightly, grabbing Josh's left wrist to detach it from the bar and sidle out to the open floor. "Okay, we're just going to—"

Jon glares at where Lovett's still touching Josh's arm, skin to skin, and Lovett drops it quickly, raising his hands and stepping to Jon's side. Jon angles his body between Lovett and his—friend, shoving a hand in Lovett's back pocket to keep him close in the crowd.

"I think you need some fresh air," Lovett says, and in a sharper tone, when Jon doesn't move, "Okay, I think I need some fresh air. Move, Jon."

Jon does, after another moment, keeping his narrowed eyes on Josh and his body between the two of them as they move toward the exit. Josh rolls his eyes and turns to the bartender as if he's not paying attention.

The air is cooler outside, and everything is a lot quieter, but a red fog still seems to cloud Jon's mind.

"What is going on with you?" Lovett asks, pausing on the sidewalk to turn to him, and the concern in his eyes is too much, on top of everything else Jon is feeling. He actually growls, something he's not sure he's ever done before, and crowds up against Lovett, both hands on his ass. They stumble backwards into the alley next to the bar.

"What—" Lovett starts, and breaks off with a gasp. Jon grabs him by the backs of his thighs and hauls him up against him, staggering a little under his weight. They slam against the brick wall harder than he intends, and Lovett bangs his head against it. "Ow!" he yells.

"Sorry, sorry," Jon breathes, and bites his neck, hard.

"Ow again," Lovett says, but he sounds more breathy than angry, and Jon sucks at the skin between his teeth, raising a hot red welt he can see even by the dim streetlamps when he lifts his head away again.

"You like him," he says darkly, pushing the collar of Lovett's t-shirt away with his nose and mouthing along the line of his shoulder. Lovett's head knocks back against the brick wall again.

"What? Who? Josh?"

Jon bites him again for saying his name.

"You fucked him."

"Yeah, like twice. In, like, February," Lovett protests. He's hard in his jeans, now, pressing insistently against Jon's stomach. Jon pulls hard at the fly of his pants and hears the button fly off, pinging against the brick somewhere in the distance. "Jesus Christ!"

Jon has to put his hand back on Lovett's thigh before he loses his grip or his balance, so instead of reaching into Lovett's now-open jeans, he just grinds against him, slow and nasty.

Lovett is trying to contain the noises he's making, swallowing them down, and Jon sucks at the bruise on his neck as punishment.

"You won't do it again," he promises. "You won't even want to."

"No, I pro—probably won't, you fucking freak," Lovett moans, fingers digging into Jon's shoulders. Jon licks at his neck, his mouth, which he still hasn't kissed. Lovett's lips are parted, his breath coming quick, eyes wide and locked on Jon's.

Voices suddenly rise in the street and Lovett's head snaps towards them, panicked. Jon grabs his jaw and makes him look into his eyes, still rolling his hips against him.

"Stop. It doesn't matter if they see you like this."

"It—it does?" Lovett says. He's close, Jon can tell.

"It doesn't. Let them see you. They should see you're mine." And finally taking Lovett's mouth in a hard, punishing kiss, he feels him shake apart against him, coming in his jeans.

Jon grinds in one more time and joins him.

After a long minute in which neither of them speaks, Jon gingerly detaches Lovett's thighs from his hips and lowers them to the ground. His higher brain functions are, horribly, creeping back.

"Oh God," he says.

Lovett laughs with an edge of hysteria.

"Oh God," Jon says again, staring at the ground so he doesn't have to look at Lovett's bright red face and bite marks and open pants. "I don't. I don't know what that was."

"Yeah, me fucking neither," says Lovett, and softens his tone when Jon winces. "Hey, I mean, I enjoyed it. Don't freak out."

"I'm not freaking out," says Jon, dishonestly. "Jesus, I just mauled you in an alley." Lovett flings up his arms.

"And all's well that ends well!"

"Oh God," Jon says, a third time, and calls them a cab, guiding Lovett into it with a hand at the small of his back.

Later, when Lovett's asleep, Jon reaches onto the nightstand and, after a moment’s guilty indecision, deletes Josh's name from his phone. He sets it back down, settles against Lovett, and closes his eyes, trying to pretend against the hum of satisfaction singing through his whole body.

 

* * *

 

 

Jon flies back to Massachusetts for his cousin’s wedding in late September. He not even sure he should go—“Seriously, Lovett, what if the….you know...sex effects wear off halfway across Illinois?”—but Lovett just rolls his eyes when he says he might skip, and gets up to rummage through the fridge, coming back with new beers for both of them.

“You’ve been fine for months,” he says, passing Jon one of the bottles and clinking them with a weird little smirk as he draws his own back to take a deep gulp. “Thanks to my—"

“Don’t say it—”

“—spec _tac_ ular healing cock—”

“Gag me,” Jon says in an undertone.

“With pleasure,” Lovett tells him, which _should_ make Jon rolls his eyes, but between one thing and another they’re naked and panting on the floor behind the sofa before Jon gets around to saying, “I’m _serious_.”

“You always are,” Lovett says idly, and rolls over to rest his head on Jon’s chest. Jon slings an arm around his shoulders, runs his fingers gently up and down the length of Lovett’s upper arm just to feel the way he shivers and nestles closer, tightening his own arm across Jon’s torso. When Jon’s near Lovett, everything seems impossibly simple, deliciously easy. Lovett is his spoonful of sugar _and_ his medicine; if Jon takes his self-prescribed dose at least once, preferably two, three times daily, nothing goes wrong and no-one gets hurt. If he doesn’t…

“I’m just nervous,” he says, and lets his fingers slip up to stroke Lovett’s flattened curls, to trace the shell of his ear. “You don’t know what it was like.”

“I know a little what it was like,” Lovett says. “I heard plenty of reportage.”

“You weren’t there,” Jon says flatly. “It was…..It can’t happen again. It can’t happen on a cross-country flight and it can’t happen at my poor cousin’s wedding—”

“It won’t happen,” Lovett insists. He shifts to raise himself up on one elbow and stares down at Jon’s face, startlingly fierce. “We figured it out. Okay? We figured it out, you just need to stay, uh, sated.”

“Eurgh,” Jon says.

“And you _are_. I went out of town last month, and you said everything was completely normal. No problems. No zombie sex mobs to speak of.”

“That was just one weekend,” Jon says.

“ _This_ is just one weekend!”

“Well, it’s a scarier weekend,” Jon says, and doesn’t pretend he’s too proud to arch up into the soft kiss Lovett drops on his lips, to turn his cheek into Lovett’s hand when it comes up to cup his face.

“It’s gonna be fine, Jon,” Lovett says. “You’re gonna have a good old-fashioned freakout on the runway—bet you’ve missed those, huh?—and eat those, uh, Delta’s serving those honey-roasted peanuts now, they’re great—”

“—you’re a freak—”

“I’m _comforting_ you,” Lovett says. “And you’re gonna get to see your parents, which you haven’t in like—six months, dude, and I know that’s sucked for you—and go to a wedding, which you love, because you’re so stupid romantic—”

“—I’m _not—_ ” Jon says.

“—and you’re gonna dance all night. And have a blast. And nothing’s gonna go wrong. The end.” Jon closes his eyes. “Hey, idiot,” Lovett says, and taps Jon’s cheek with his palm, soft but firm, until Jon opens them again. “And if it does—shut up—if it does, if anything starts to seem weird—you know how to fix it.”

_You_ , Jon thinks. _You fix it._

“You just find someone to fuck,” Lovett says, and Jon has to bite back a sharp _no_ , _not gonna happen,_ has to tamp down an instinctive growl that, even suppressed, leaves him feeling shaky and confused. 

“I can’t—”

“Before it gets too bad,” Lovett says insistently. “You’re a catch, Favs, you can find someone to fuck at a wedding, okay?” Jon doesn’t say anything. “Promise me,” Lovett says.

“I promise,” Jon says after a charged moment.

“Good,” Lovett says, and climbs to his feet, wanders back round the couch to find his beer. Jon watches him go, thinks about palming his thighs, biting his ass, thinks about bending him over the back of the couch and eating him out until he’s wet and loose—he thinks good things, uncomplicated things, and tries not to think about what he promised Lovett, about the fact that it’s a promise he’s not sure he could keep.

 

 

Lovett drives him to the airport. “Your stop,” he says, pulling up outside the Delta entrance. “Be sure to tip your driver.”

“Oh, I’ll tip him,” Jon says, leering a little.

Lovett turns to squint at him. “I just gave it to you like forty minutes ago,” he says.

“Just—storing it up,” Jon says. “Filling the tank.”

“‘The tank,’” Lovett mouths with an incredulous look, then says, again, determinedly, “Everything will be fine,” and Jon smiles, and agrees, and pretends not to know that the look on Lovett’s face means _he’s_ not sure, either.

But the wild part is: everything _is_ fine. Jon passes through security without getting tackled, says, “Thanks,” to a bored TSA agent who barely grunts in response, buys a bottle of water from a Hudson News and snaps a photo with it, making a whoops face, to send to Lovett, who responds with a picture of a miserable-looking baby seal. _All good_ , Jon types back.

_And here I assumed you were texting from under a pile of sex-crazed maniacs_ , Lovett says. _Very relieved._

_Ha ha._

It’s not remarkable, it’s just—of course this is how it’s been the past few months, ever since he and Lovett started hooking up. People have been pretty much normal, no-one’s hit on him more than they used to before the change, he hasn’t seen that look—that blank, scary, want-you-at-any-cost look—since July, except in the occasional nightmare. But for all that, Jon’s been cautious, because cautious is the right thing to be. Don’t trust a stopgap to last forever—that’s just common sense. And it feels wild to be flying away from the one person who’s imposed order on the chaos of his new life.

It feels wild, too, he thinks, flipping through magazines and glancing across at his gate now and then to see if boarding’s started, to think of _Lovett_ as an element of order. But when Jon thinks about him, even now, as fear of the plane, his own body, the uncertain future combine to make his stomach lurch a little, he just feels...grounded.

Lovett makes Jon feel safe.

Jesus.

Jon rubs his forehead, and crosses to wait by the ticket counter. His phone pings. _Ask for an exit row,_ Lovett says. _If anyone tries to attack you, jump out!_

_You’re making it worse_ , Jon types back.

_Nah._ Then: _Text when you land._

On the plane, staring straight ahead, tamping down the nerves that always accompany taxiing and takeoff, Jon checks his phone one last time. Lovett’s messaged him again: a picture of his own face, neither well-lit nor thoughtfully composed. He’s squinting into the frame, expression slightly uncomfortable, but soft and honest, the way he almost never seems in photos  _Seriously, don’t die,_ the accompanying message reads.

Jon’s finger hovers over the picture. Then he tabs back, says, _Okay. For you,_ and puts his phone on airplane mode. The plane speeds up; Jon closes his eyes, and braces himself as it bears him up and away.

 

 

Jon’s mom picks him up from the airport and hugs him so tightly he almost can’t breathe. “Mom,” he protests, but not too hard, and hugs her back almost as fiercely anyway.

“I’m _sorry_ ,” she says, voice muffled. “But we’ve been so worried about you.”

Jon grabs his bag and throws it in the trunk of the car, pushing down a pang. There’s a part of him that’s wondered, before, if the right thing to do, after being dismissed from the White House back in June, would have been to get in a car and drive up the coast instead of heading cross-country. Maybe it would have been better to take haven in a familiar place, familiar people. Maybe that would have been the smart move.

But Jon’s never been great at retreat to advance. He hadn’t thought once about the possibility of falling back. And when Lovett had said, “Come to California—”

What was he gonna do? Not do that?

“You look good,” Lillian tells him as they pull out onto the freeway. She glances assessingly at him, sidelong.

“Watch the road, Mom,” he says.

“I’m just _saying_.” She reaches over to take his hand. “After you left the White House—”

“ _Mom—_ ”

“I know you were having a tough time!” she says, and squeezes his fingers. “But—things are better?”

“Yeah,” he says, “I told you.”

“Well, you look better. You look good,” she says again. “You’ve just seemed happy recently, and that’s nice, that’s what a mother likes to see.”

“I am,” Jon says, then asks after his dad to change the subject, watches the mile markers along the freeway whiz by until it’s their exit, and they’re turning off, he’s heading home.

 

 

It’s the perfect time of year to be back in Winchester, all the leaves starting to change, and even if Favs does have permanent beach brain now, he’s missed this, the way fall feels as it rolls in, and also everything keeps being _okay_ , all Friday and Saturday, through the rehearsal dinner where, yes, three girls and one guy _do_ hit on him, but a completely normal amount. When he texts Lovett an update, Lovett just says _so who’s the contender?_ which makes Jon frown.

_No contender,_ he says, but Lovett texts back, _it’s a wedding, I’m just saying,_ and Jon mostly talks to family after that.

No-one jumps him before the wedding. No-one jumps him during the wedding. His cousin’s fiance—no, husband, on account of how things went off blessedly without a hitch—doesn’t turn around mid-ceremony with a glazed look on his face the way he had in some of Jon’s more vivid daymares. Everyone’s just happy, and relatively disinterested in Jon, which is exactly how he likes it. He’s cruising a wave of complete, if cautious, contentment when he turns away from the open bar to find himself face to face with Great Aunt Edna. She grabs his arm shockingly firmly for a 93-year-old woman and holds him in place. “Uh, hi, Aunt Edna—” Jon says.

She peers disconcertingly up into his eyes until, with a pinched little look, she says, “ _Well_ ,” and drags him off to a quiet corner of the room.

“Uh, do you,” Jon says, but she shhhhs him, still squinting.

“June,” she says finally, “I _knew_ I knew. You made very quick work.” She sounds approving.

“Of…?” he says.

“Your poor Great Uncle Michael,” she says, ignoring him, “my brother—he spent 17 years in the attic.” Then: “Well, it was different then, it’s easier these days.”

“ _What?”_ Jon yelps.

“Phones,” she says, and sighs. “Well, who is it?”

“Who’s _who_ ,” Jon says, and she says, “your bonded,” and he says, “my _what_ ,” glancing helplessly at the vodka soda in his hand. He should have gotten a double. He should have gotten two doubles. “Aunt Edna—”

“Your mate,” Edna says. She narrows her eyes at him. “Jonathan Edward Favreau,” she says severely, “answer your Great Aunt. I haven’t spent ninety-three years on this earth to be who-whatted by a grown man with no manners. Where are they? I want to meet them.”

“I don’t—I don’t have a _mate_ ,” Jon says. He takes a deep gulp of his drink.

Edna looks around. “Oh, sure,” she says. “You don’t have a mate, you just decided to turn the charm off in honor of the special occasion.”

“Aunt Edna—”

“Seventeen years your Uncle Michael spent in the attic, but you, oh, you fix your little problem in four months—”

“Aunt _Edna—_ ”

“ _Y_ _ou_ don’t need to find your great love! Oh, no! Smart boy, you can just switch it off, poof!” She snaps her fingers in his face. “ _And_ with no help from your elders—”

“My elder was on a three-month Mediterranean cruise!” Jon snaps.

Edna hmphs. “Well,” she says, settling a little. “I _earned_ it.”

Jon scrubs a hand across his face. He drains the rest of his drink and sets the glass down on a passing waiter’s tray, nodding thanks.

“See?” Edna says. “He didn’t even try to—”

“This is very weird to discuss with you,” Jon says in a strangled tone, cutting her off before she can reach the doubtlessly scarring second half of her sentence. “I—” What’s he supposed to say, even? He hasn’t solved it. He _hasn’t._  “I found a stopgap,” he says, and then, in the face of her expectant silence, he says, ears hot, “I found, uh. I have a friend who. Uh.” Edna squints at him. “I have a friend—my friend and I—” Silence. “When we, uh, you know, people don’t.” Jesus. “When we have sex,” Jon says, steeling himself—he wrote for the _President_ , he can do this—“other people don’t try to have sex with me.”

“...your mate,” Edna says after a long pause, in a tone that implies his brain is made of beef jerky.

“ _No_ ,” Jon snaps, “my _friend_. He’s just my _friend_. And he’s—he’s a really good friend, too, okay? He doesn’t _have_ to do this for me. He has plenty of options, he—honestly, he deserves better than being my—my sex bandaid, okay? He deserves to be somebody’s boyfriend. He deserves someone who—” Jon’s throat feels tight. “But after I...he was the only person who made me feel normal, and he took care of me, and I just—”

_Take advantage of him,_ Jon thinks, finally, and lets himself take one shuddering breath before he schools his face again, counts in, out.

Edna looks at him. Her face is considering. On the dance floor, everybody’s doing the Electric Slide, which, Jon doesn’t even _like_ dancing and he’d _still_ rather be doing that then standing here, eyes prickling uncomfortably under the weight of Edna’s scrutiny. Finally: “Young people,” she says. “You’re all stupid.”

“ _Hey—_ ”

“You’re stupid,” she says, “and you don’t listen. When I was young, I was stupid, but I’m old now, so I’m smart and you’ll listen to me because I’m telling you to.” Jon doesn’t respond. He has a lump in his throat, and a pit in his stomach, and something that feels like the beginning of a migraine pounding in his head. If Lovett were here, Jon could find somewhere quiet, lie down with his head in his lap, close his eyes while Lovett—he can be, Jon’s discovered, shockingly gentle—rubbed his thumb in soothing circles on Jon’s temple. Lovett’s not here. Of course Lovett’s not—

“When you and your ‘sex friend’—”

“Oh my God,” Jon murmurs in horror.

“—did your whole—”

“I know what we did!”

“—for the first time—how’d it feel? All,” Edna makes incomprehensible gestures around her head, her small, wrinkled face scrunching up like a walnut shell, “whoo, whoo! Golden and glowy, right?” Jon’s silent. “Maybe other people got a little scary with you, huh? But your—”

“Please don’t say it again,” Jon says.

“—your _friend—”_ a sharp look—“didn’t?”

Jon really doesn’t think this is the time _or_ the place to relive the first time he and Lovett—fucked, Jesus, he can say it in his own _head_ , Great Aunt present or not. But he can’t help it, the memory rises unbidden: the way Lovett had come close and tipped his head up, baring his throat, curling his hands into the fabric of Jon’s shirt, the way he’d looked glazed but lucid, shivering when Jon bent towards him, the feeling of Lovett’s biceps, his waist, his ass beneath Jon’s hands—

“Ahem,” Edna says.

“He was—” Jon’s struggling. “I don’t know, he was—”

“He was _different_ ,” Edna prompts him.

“Well,” Jon says, and then, helplessly, “He’s _Lovett_ ,” which is like opening the floodgates to ten, a hundred, a thousand more thoughts and images, one after the other, knocking into each other like dominos. Lovett’s face, sleep-soft and unguarded as he wakes up each morning (God, Jon sees him every _morning_ now). The way he groans when Jon tries to talk to him, burrows his head into Jon’s stomach. How he pretends to still be sleeping so that Jon has no choice but to dig a finger in under his ribs, tickle him till he yelps, roll him over in the bed and rut against his back, dick nudging between his thighs, the kind of slow, syrupy sex that seems to last forever. And then, beyond the sex, the way Lovett’s eyes crinkle when he laughs, the way his forehead wrinkles when he frowns, the way he’s Jon’s favorite person to talk to, to hang out with, to be near, the way he’s just—Jon’s favorite.

“You bonded,” Edna tells him. “Like a marriage, only—” waving around—“none of this chocolate fountain, linen napkin, gilded guestbook garbage, just—the body, knowing.”

Jon stands in front of her, reeling silently as the truth of what she’s saying settles in. He remembers the blinding moment when he first slid into Lovett, how his body went weak and shaky and his entire world tunneled down to Lovett. He’d never felt anything like it before, and he’d written it off as a quirk of the, the sex curse, or whatever, but maybe—

“Oh, god,” he mutters, scrubbing his face with one hand.

Edna waves one arm in the air, vindicated.  “I told you.”

“So, it’s like a lifetime bond?” Jon asks in a small voice.

“Of course,” she says, seemingly pleased that he’s finally catching on.  “Once you’ve found your mate, a biological bond is formed.  You’re tied together forever now.  That’s why you don’t attract anyone else anymore.”

Jon doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “Okay. Okay. How do I fix it?”

Edna looks, for the first time, truly taken aback. “What?”

“How do I…” Jon takes a deep breath. “How do I let him go?”

“Jonathan,” she says, “ _Edward—_ ”

“I can’t _keep_ him,” Jon says, so sharply that heads turn, so sharply that Edna stops, actually stops—“I _can’t_ ,” he says, “if I—he fucked me as a favor. That’s why. It was a favor between friends and _that’s_ what he agreed to, okay? He didn’t agree to be—married to me, I wouldn’t have said yes if I’d known I—if I’d even thought—I can live in an attic. I can. I can do that. Just tell me how to, I don’t know, divorce him, and I’ll do it, and even if I do love him—”

“And he loves _you_ ,” Edna says.

Jon stops.

“You think you can bond with any idiot off the street? Do you have a brain in there? Young,” she says, “ _dumb_. The love—that’s what turns it off,” Edna says, almost pityingly. “ _Poof_. That’s what makes everyone else go, eh,” waving her hands in dismissal, “he’s not such hot stuff. When you find the one you really love—who really loves you—”

Jon’s gaping.

“Of course he loves you too,” she says again. “Let him _go_. You’re stupid,” she says again, shaking her head, but not unkindly.

“—I have to go,” Jon says. He grabs her by the shoulders, kisses one cheek and then the other, mutters, “ _Thank_ you—tell Martha congratulations,” and he’s out the door like a shot, already calling a cab, _who really loves you_ , calling the airline, _who really loves you_ , mentally calculating, _who really really really loves you_ , how quickly he can get back to where he needs to be.

 

 

Jon barely registers the trip to the airport, boards the plane in a daze, can’t think clear enough to be scared, can’t think—heart pounding like he’s running the world’s longest marathon—about anything but Lovett—Lovett saying, “Go west, young man,” in that stupid beloved jokey tone, Lovett waving through the window, pretending to swoon when Jon flexed and grinned, he thinks about Lovett throwing himself onto the sofa next to Jon, stealing the remote, changing the channel without asking, about trying to wrestle it back till they’re both sick with laughter, kicking each other weakly from opposite ends of the couch. Lovett ranting about Traffic on the 405, Lovett reading a particularly stupid email out loud to Jon, looking up only to make scathing remarks, pleased, small smile on his face when Jon laughs in response—

Jon rests his head against the window and tries to breathe, willing the plane to fly faster. _Hang on_ , he thinks, wishing Lovett could hear him. _I’m coming_. _I’m gonna make this right._

 

 

Jon's sweaty and out of breath by the time he finally slams open the door and finds Lovett, curled up in the corner of the couch, phone in hand and probably scrolling twitter.

"You loved me?" he asks. He feels wild with the need to know now, instantly, before they waste another minute. A quick expression flickers across Lovett's face before he shuts it down to blankness.

"What?" he asks, his tone neutral.

"Did you love me?" Jon asks, dropping his bag and drawing closer, trying not to feel like a predator stalking prey. "Before. Before you smelled me. Before I moved to LA. Did you love me?"

Lovett's face looks closed off, trapped, but his body is tipped forward as far as it can be, leaning in, drawn towards Jon. Every part of Jon's body sings out with how right that feels.

"Oh, is it not enough that everybody wants to tear your clothes off?" Lovett sounds like he's trying to make his voice light and breezy, but he's not pulling it off. "Now everyone has to have feelings for you, too? Wow, talk about greedy."

"This isn't a joke," Jon snaps.

Lovett holds the innocent pose for a minute, then seems to buckle. His eyes dart to meet Jon's and away again. "Yeah," he says quietly. "Yeah, I do. Did. I do. Uh. Love you. But we don't need to make a big deal of it if—" Lovett's words are cut off by Jon grabbing him by the waist and kissing him breathless.

He pulls back to yank Lovett sideways so he's on his back, and pins him against the couch by his wrists and just looks at him, trying to get enough air into his lungs. Lovett’s still trying to wriggle away, avoiding Jon’s eyes.

"No. Look at me," he says.

After a moment, Lovett does.

"It was a bond," Jon mutters softly, leaning down to bite a mark into Lovett's skin and shoving his hands up Lovett’s shirt. "It was a bond, it's really true, we did it. We bonded."

Lovett looks overwhelmed, tentatively pleased. His gaze keeps wandering away, until Jon grabs his jaw and holds him still to stare into his eyes. He can feel his own body trembling with urgency to take him, to claim him. His mate.

He mouths haphazardly at every part of Lovett that he can reach: his lips, his throat, his temple, his throat again. He’s been leaving hickeys on Lovett since they first started fucking, but usually they’re located where a shirt can cover them, mostly. Now, not so much.

“You’re mine,” he growls into the warm hollow of Lovett’s throat. “You’re my mate.” And before Lovett can speak, Jon is grabbing his pants and yanking them to his ankles in one hard pull. He surges up to take Lovett's mouth again, and fights down the thrum of dissatisfaction when Lovett puts his hands against Jon's chest and pushes back, keeping him away.

"Wait, wait wait wait," Lovett says. "I mean, do that again but in a minute. I just—it's okay? Right? You're not mad, clearly, but I want to make sure you're okay—"

“What?” Jon says, trying to focus. “Okay? I’m, I’m great, I,” and he loses the thread again and just pushes Lovett’s thighs up to his chest and bypasses his dick to press his tongue into his ass.

“Oh my fucking god,” Lovett says, somewhere far away. This isn’t anything like Jon’s normal rimming, which he loves and will do for as long as Lovett allows, careful and thorough, reveling in the response he can draw out. But today, he doesn't have the patience to do anything but fuck into him with his tongue, hard and wet and and demanding, forcing it in without preamble. He wants to crawl inside Lovett, consume him. He wants to own him.

It takes a while but at last he feels Lovett relax around him, harsh noises coming from his throat. He pulls back to look at his handiwork.

Lovett—his _mate_ , his body screams—is curled up under him, his thighs to his chest, contained safely under Jon's body. He's red and wet where Jon's mouth has been, and his stomach is shiny with precome, the head of his dick rubbing lightly against it. He winces when Jon unfolds his legs and Jon feels briefly guilty, before he sinks under another wave of lust.

He grabs Lovett by the hips and flips him over, spreading his ass with his thumbs. The lube is too far away to contemplate and Jon can't think, can't breathe. He takes his cock in his hand and presses it insistently against Lovett's soft, fucked-open hole.

Jon can barely hear Lovett's voice over the roaring in his ears as he sinks into that heat, inch by inch.

“Oh, you—" Lovett's voice breaks. "Fuck, why is that so good—"

He can't quite get it in all the way to the root, the friction finally becoming painful, so he licks his hand sloppily and rubs where their bodies meet. Lovett shivers and rubs his face into the couch cushion, his whole body gone pliant and easy.

They haven't used a condom, he realizes somewhere in the back of his mind, and loves the thought.

“You’re mine, you belong to me,” he hisses, gripping Lovett’s hips to keep him underneath him, where he belongs. He leans down and bites hard at Lovett’s back, and hears him sob into the couch.

"Jesus, you feel so fucking good like this, so big," he hears, half muffled by fabric. "I—"

Jon reaches under him to wrap his right arm around Lovett's chest, his hand pressed possessively against his heart. Lovett drags in a breath and moans. “God, please, touch me, touch my dick, please—”

“No,” Jon groans, bracing his arms to cage Lovett in even more, and fucks in even harder so Lovett has to use his arms to keep himself from sliding forward. He's never felt so out of control or so confident. “You’re going to come without it.”

At that, Lovett gives a ragged little scream.

"Fuck you, my body doesn’t work like that, you know I can't! I can't."

"You're going to," Jon says. "You're going to, for me."

“Fuck, I hate you,” Lovett moans. “Touch me!”

“You don’t. You love me. You love me,” Jon groans into his back, still disbelieving, overwhelmed with gratitude and joy. Lovett shudders under him.

“Yeah,” he agrees, more breath than sound.

"Say it," Jon says. "Say it again."

“I love you,” Lovett whispers, and Jon can feel him starting to tense beneath him, hitching in the quick breaths he takes when he's about to tip over the edge.

At the thought of it, Jon can't control himself any longer. He can feel his orgasm overtaking him, and he knows Lovett can feel it, too, because he suddenly twists in Jon’s grip, hitching a furious breath.

“No, you fucking—NO! Not yet!”

Lovett shoves back against him, but Jon is already coming, filling him. He collapses to the couch, holding Lovett down with his full weight as he comes for longer than should be possible, pouring himself into that perfect, clutching warmth. Claiming him. His mate.

When he comes back to himself, Lovett is still complaining, high-pitched and desperate. Jon nuzzles his cheek and drops a poorly-aimed kiss somewhere near his hairline, then pulls out with a groan and lets Lovett squirm onto his back beneath him.

"Shh," he says soothingly. He kisses Lovett's cheek and slips three fingers into his body, where he's so hot and open now, sticky with Jon's come. Lovett cuts off whatever he's saying with a pained gasp.

"You're so full of me," he murmurs, sliding his fingers to feel his own come between them. "You're dripping with it."

Lovett is staring past him with glazed eyes. "Look at me," he coaxes, and Lovett does, swallowing. There's something wild in his expression that Jon hasn't seen before, and he thrills at the sight. "You're perfect. You took it all so perfectly. Can you feel it inside you? Filling you up?" He rubs slowly at his prostate, indulgent.

And then, at last, Lovett gasps and seizes up, his knees jumping painfully into Favs's sides as he comes. It looks almost violent. His cock jerks hard in the air, still untouched. He's shivering all over like he's being electrocuted.

"That's right," Jon says, holding his hand firm against Lovett's clenching muscles as he works through the last of it. "That's it. You're so good. So good for me."

When it's finally over, Lovett drops his legs back to the couch, covers his face with both hands and laughs into them, an edge of hysteria in his voice.

"Jesus Christ," he says, voice muffled. "What does Delta _put_ in those honey-roasted peanuts?"

Jon reaches up and pulls Lovett’s hands away from his face, wanting to look at him and take in every pore and freckle and hair. “You love me,” he sighs happily, settling down over Lovett and nuzzling his cheek.

Lovett tenses a little at that, but then relaxes again, lifting Jon’s hand to his face and kissing his fingers. “So, you like that?” he asks casually. “It doesn’t bother you?”

Jon bites at the juncture of Lovett's neck. "Why would it bother me?"

"You don't think I took advantage of your—condition?" Lovett asks quietly. His eyes are fixed at a point on the other side of the living room, unseeing.

Jon pulls back from Lovett, pushing himself into a sitting position. "You didn't take advantage of me, we formed a love bond," he says, indignant. He wants Lovett to appreciate this as much as he does—this, the greatest, most momentous thing that’s ever happened to him. Or anyone. Probably anyone.

"A what bond?" Lovett asks, his brow furrowing.

"A _love_ bond!" Jon repeats insistently. "I already told you! When I first walked in!"

"You _very much did not_ ," Lovett says firmly, propping himself up on his elbows and glaring at Jon.

Jon rewinds everything that happened from the moment he walked in the door. He walked in, saw Lovett, he got Lovett to confess to his feelings, and then he _thoroughly explained ev—_ oh.

So, fine. He might have missed a step. Understandable, Jon thinks defensively, looking down at Lovett—his _mate_ , his heart sings happily—sprawled and sated beneath him.

“I saw my great-aunt at the wedding,” Jon says, deciding to start from the beginning. “She told me—it’s, look, don’t laugh,” he says, suddenly feeling nervous. He’s known about the bond for all of ten hours and already it’s infinitely precious to him. “She called it a love bond. Or mating, I guess. It happens when you have sex—well, not with anyone, with someone you’re in love with. Or even if you don’t know, I’m not sure I did, although I guess I must have on some level—“

“Wait, Jon, shut up,” Lovett says, elbowing up to a sitting position. “You’re rambling.”

Jon sighs in frustration. Edna had been able to explain this is all of fifteen seconds, and Jon is a _professional speechwriter._

"We love each other, and we had sex, and we cemented a soulmate—bond—thing," Jon finally spits out.

Lovett stares at him with a baffled look on his face for a long minute.

“Please say something?” Jon begs. Oh god, he thinks, watching Lovett’s face, he’s going to run. Jon’s going to lose him forever. He’s honestly not sure he could survive that.

“You love me?” Lovett asks finally.

“Yeah,” Jon says cautiously. “Yeah, like I told you earlier—“

“You didn’t tell me _jack shit_ ,” Lovett interrupts, but a smile is growing on his face. He reaches for Jon’s hand and tangles their fingers together. “You love me?”

Jon nods, happiness blossoming in his chest. “More than anything,” he manages to say.

A grin bursts across Lovett’s face. “Of course you do,” he says. Happiness radiates off of Lovett, his entire countenance a sunbeam aimed right at Jon. “Very smart of you.”

“You love me too,” Jon retorts, pushing forward and pressing Lovett onto his back. “Don’t forget that.”

“I won’t,” Lovett says, tilting his face up to be kissed. Jon, giddy and love-drunk, is more than happy to comply. He’s full of a joy he never imagined, and he knows Lovett feels the same way. It’s as if recognizing their bond made it ten times stronger. He can feel Lovett’s bliss thrumming under his skin, taste the triumph on his tongue.

Lovett makes a thoughtful noise in his throat and pulls away, pushing Jon back when he tries to chase his lips. “God, it’s all making so much _sense_ now. No _wonder_ you’ve been acting like such a freak.”

“Hey,” Jon protests, pro forma, biting Lovett’s jaw.

Lovett runs a hand up Jon’s back, tangles it in his short hair. “Remember that night with Josh from the gym?”

Jon rolls his hips into Lovett’s thigh lazily as he thinks back to their heated, clumsy fumbling in the alley, the way he was overwhelmed with the need to possess and claim Lovett where everyone could see. “Uh, yeah,” he says, burying his face in Lovett’s throat, burning red with the memory. “I think I remember something about that.”

Lovett twists to peer directly down at Jon. “Oh my God,” he says, “you _did_ delete his number!”

Jon groans into Lovett’s neck, then kisses it once for good measure. “Lenience, your honor,” he says, voice muffled, but Lovett just laughs and wriggles under him.

“I should be mad,” he says, but he sounds cheerful.

“I wasn’t thinking straight,” Jon says. “You make it hard for me to _think_ straight. You kept telling me…”

“What?”

“You kept telling me to fuck other people,” Jon says. He doesn’t even like saying it.

Lovett’s quiet for a long moment. Finally, he says, “Uncharacteristic as it might seem, I was trying to be selfless.” He sounds uncomfortable. Jon thinks about what it would feel like to tell Lovett, right now, to pursue someone else; to act like he thought it would be better for him. It’s like wearing a shirt two sizes too small. “For the record,” Lovett says, “I didn’t enjoy it.”

“It’s not uncharacteristic,” Jon says, but Lovett just snorts.

“I knew how I felt about you when I volunteered,” is all he says. “I shouldn’t have—”

“But what if you _hadn’t_ ,” Jon says insistently, and then: “You told me to fuck a wedding guest.”

“Yeah,” Lovett says.

“I was never gonna fuck a wedding guest.”

“A shockingly cavalier attitude about public health and safety,” Lovett says. “But who am I to judge.” He sounds smug, though, soft and pleased.

“Only you,” Jon tells him, and kisses him again to drive the point home.

“I will say,” Lovett murmurs a little while later, kissing the underside of Jon’s jaw, “that bursting into a room and barebacking only counts as a love confession in your crazy, bizarre brain. I demand flowery words and poems from the greatest speechwriter in the country from now on.”

“That’s President Obama,” Jon says automatically. He pulls back to look at Lovett. “Still, you have to admit it was pretty good.”

“Ugh, of course I admit that,” Lovett groans, dragging one foot up Jon’s calf. “God, what am I supposed to do with you?”

“Keep me,” Jon says, settling down again and snuggling closer to Lovett. “If you work really hard, maybe I’ll learn a thing or two in time.”

“Objection, shameless pandering,” Lovett laughs, wrapping his arms around Jon’s back and squeezing. “‘ _Keep me_ ,'" he mutters into Jon’s shoulder. “Your weirdo biology already took care of that for us, apparently."

Jon stiffens a little. Is Lovett upset? _Did_ he take advantage of Lovett? Before he can pull away, Lovett tightens his hold and snorts. "Don't," he says, and his voice softens. "I'm so happy." Lovett turns his face fully into Jon’s neck, so that Jon can't see his smile, can only feel it.

Jon lets out a shuddery breath and relaxes, finally, fully, against Lovett. “Me, too,” he says wonderingly. “Me, too.”


End file.
